They contributed heavily to the flow of the customer journey. “They didn’t just take orders, hand over the technology, and walk away. “Telepin isn’t a typical ‘coin operated’ vendor,” says Rehman, recalling the period spent developing the Valyou mobile wallet solution with their Canadian partner. Which is why Valyou simply had to partner with Telepin, whose relationship with Valyou’s parent company, Telenor, had cemented their reputation as a strategic partner. It had to be designed for inexperienced users, because its target customer was not especially tech-savvy. The technology had to be stable, because even a minute of downtime could shred their reputation. In the Malaysian migrant consumer economy, where competition for market-share is won and lost based on peer-to-peer recommendations, Valyou could not afford failure of any kind. Rehman and his team soon realized that overcoming these related challenges would require two broad strategies. Valyou had to seek a robust platform in order to integrate with these diverse players- from remittances, and bill payments to airtime top-ups and more-in order to offer seamless connectivity to customers. The inherent challenge that Valyou faced was maneuvering complicated integrations with banks and payout partners who had complex currencies and platforms. They had to integrate to a variety of platforms. For Valyou, this was a formidable barrier: how could they nurture engagement and build velocity with customers who didn’t immediately see and accept their differentiated value?ģ. In fact, many actively mistrusted new technology. These customers weren’t digital natives, fluent in the visual language of app interfaces. They had to break into a tech-wary market.Īlthough the migrant worker population urgently needed a way to send money without the inconvenience of brick-and-mortar or the insecurity of fly-by-night providers, a mobile-only solution wasn’t a natural fit, either. They would need a way to build and sustain trust, one customer at a time.Ģ. To succeed, Valyou would need more than good technology. One successful customer could bring a hundred others conversely, one unhappy customer could have an enormous negative impact. The migrant community was an insular one whose buying behavior was heavily influenced by word-of-mouth. With this advantage came a steep hill to climb, though. At the beginning of its transformation, Valyou had an advantage: not many of these operators offered a mobile wallet service. The Malaysian market is a crowded one, with more than 70 players (including traditional banks) jostling for customers. To achieve this degree of market penetration, Valyou had to overcome three significant challenges: Their customers use the service to send international remittances, pay their bills, and top up their mobile phones in Malaysia and overseas, all from an award-winning app on their mobile device. Today, Valyou (whose portmanteau combines value and you, emphasizing their mandate of customer-focused care) is the fastest growing mobile wallet provider in Malaysia, with a merchant network that’s over 2,000 strong and growing. With this mission as his polestar and Telepin as his partner, Rehman and his Valyou team set to work to transform remittance and create an impact on the lives of millions. Rehman felt committed to helping these migrant workers divert their money away from the hands of unscrupulous or institutional operators and into the hands of family members more smoothly, reliably and conveniently. These 1.7 million people needed an alternative both to traditional banks, which failed them by requiring “on location” visits (impossible for many), and illegal or insecure operators (who put both migrants and their earnings at risk). When Fahad Rehman moved to Malaysia in 2016 to become Head of Technology at Valyou, his initial objective was clear: transform the company into an innovative mobile financial service operator, delivering digital financial services to the underbanked and unbanked segments.īut the more time he spent in Malaysia, the more Rehman came to recognize a second, more meaningful objective concealed behind the first: to help the migrant worker population in Malaysia take control of their money, by digitally fixing the gaps in the current model.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |