I work in PR and have represented quite a few startup fintech companies. What puzzles me is that there are masses of these companies all around the world, yet they all seem to do the exact same thing (p2p payments, digital wallet stuff, transfer money to a business via an app etc.) They also market themselves in exactly the same way. Yet every day I see yet another utterly generic fintech company raise tens of millions of dollars in a funding round to do what every other app does.
I find this puzzling because surely fintech applications should work like a social network, ie it makes sense for everyone to be on the same application, in the same way Twitter works because lots of people are on Twitter.
I used to live in China and everyone there uses either WeChat Pay or AliPay and that’s it, and it works beautifully because everyone in the entire country is plugged into the same system (in China I could literally text money to my friends to pay them back for getting drinks, as well as pay my electric bills in the same manner). I actually had this conversation with a startup founder (although he works in agritech) and he basically said this to me, so I think I’m onto something.
Any insights you have are appreciated.
In: 1421
India has done it differently, and better I think. The central bank (Reserve Bank of India) forced every payment provider to support a “Uniform Payment Interface”, which means it doesn’t matter which app you have .. the underlying payments transfer is routed through a common network. This network doesn’t just handle person to person payments (from as small as 1 rupee, roughly 1 cent) to millions in inter-bank transfers, and also person to bank transfers such as while using wallets or toll booths. The service is free for 80% of person to person transactions because they are quite small.
It has been a game changer for the economy.
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