Will Dawson

Husband, Father, Investor, Active in the World of Mobile Payments

[williamdawson]

Shouldn’t We All Have Seamless Micropayments By Now?

The web’s founders fully expected some form of digital payment to be integral to its functioning. But nearly three decades later, we're still waiting.

It is amazing that when the web was created, the inventors knew they needed micropayments (Status Code 402), and yet, three decades later, we still do not have a system in place to handle seamless payments for the content we consume.  Think how much better the web would be if we could pay for our content with something other than our eyeballs or walled gardens requiring loads of personal information...

[williamdawson]

Stop by Mobile World Congress on Wed March 1 at CC1 from 11-1 to hear Visa, PayPal, HSBC and me talk about protecting consumers

[williamdawson]

Mobile and digital payments will overtake physical card payments as the predominant non-cash payment mode in India this year, Deloitte India predicts.

“Demonetization may well be the catalyst that sees semi-urban and rural markets in India skip the ‘card era’ and leapfrog directly to ‘mobile payments era’,” says Deloitte India.

[williamdawson]

(via The Economic Times)  The push to curb black money in India should help Mobile Money and Digital Payments.

[williamdawson]

Facebook has initiated discussions with the Indian government and local mobile operators about trialling high-altitude, ...

Facebook looking to provide back-haul services in India to expand data coverage.  

[williamdawson]

Harvard Gives the U.S. an 'F'

A broken political system is killing our competitiveness

The U.S. gets a failing grade from Harvard.  The school recommends eight steps to turn this around:

1) Reform the corporate tax code

2) Move to a territorial corporate tax system

3) Ease immigration of highly-skilled individuals

4) Address distortions and abuses in the global trading system

5) Improve infrastructure

6) Simplify and streamline federal regulation

7) Create a sustainable federal budget, including entitlement reform

8) Responsibly develop America’s energy resources

[williamdawson]

I loved this quote from Jugnoo CEO Samar Singla, “Uber is for the top 20 per cent of people, we’re for the bottom 80 per cent”. If you substitute PayTM for Uber, this quote could have come from us at MoneyOnMobile.

As Joe Ware mentioned in this Capx article, it is fun to travel to other countries to see what makes each one unique.  Joe focused on transportation, but he could have easily spoken about shopping.

In India it is possible to walk into a shop and buy a single cigarette or a couple of aspirin, instead of the packet or bottle of them, which is a concept that takes for my friends some time to get their heads around.  

If you are going to provide a digital payment network for these types of micro-transactions, you need have to rethink how you setup a payment network. Simply copying a Western model will not work.

It is easy for my friends to understand PayTM as they have PayPal as a clear reference point. Like PayPal, PayTM rides the bank rails and provides value added payment services for the 20% of the people in the country who have an active bank account.  Great model servicing a different consumer segment than ours.

MoneyOnMobile is for the people who today pay in cash and don’t have a bank account.  These people can load their cash at one of our 319,000 agents across the country; and then perform their financial transactions.

So as Samar and his team at Jugnoo are building an India solution to this India opportunity focused on rickshaws, we have built an India solution to this India opportunity in the payment space.

(via The Uberisation of the rickshaw - CapX)

[williamdawson]

The rise of tech companies - top 5 publicly traded companies by market cap are all tech.  In  2001, only one company was in the top 5 - Microsoft.

(via Chart: By VisualCapitalist.com)

[williamdawson]

“$1.2 billion loaded onto Starbucks cards and mobile app as of the first quarter of 2016″ (source WSJ and S&P Market Intelligence) which is more than many banks have in deposits.  

(via MarketWatch)

[williamdawson]

Between 1990 and 2015, the world’s population grew by 2 billion people, but the number of extremely poor people fell by a billion or below 10% of the total population.

Source: http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/what-does-it-mean-eradicate-extreme-poverty-and-halve-national-poverty-2030 

[williamdawson]

We are extremely excited to have Jim joining us as a board member to help us continue scaling up MoneyOnMobile. His experience in rolling out innovative financial services at Square will help us with our financial inclusion services in India, where we have already improved the lives of over 170 million consumers through our 300,000+ agent network.

[williamdawson]

Fitbit is entering the NFC payments space having purchased the assets of Coin.  Coin’s solution provides a much broader solution that Jawbones deal with Amex, which should help Fitbit catch up as they are late to the space.

It will be interesting to see if they had any security measures to their device, or if they will rely solely on signature verification in the US.

(via Fitbit Strikes Deal With NFC Company Coin)

[williamdawson]

Apple CEO Tim Cook is planning to visit India after his trip to China and reportedly will meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi later in the week.

Apple CEO to meet with India PM this week

[williamdawson]

Vodafone’s Vodacom in South Africa has decided to shutdown its M-Pesa service.  Interesting to see that even with its dominant market position of 31.5 m subscribers (giving it a 51% market share in the country), it has not been able to get its service to scale beyond 76,000 active subscribers.  

(via M-Pesa - SA's Mobile Financial Services)

[williamdawson]

MasterCard Beats Street, Grows Digital | PYMNTS.com

MasterCard's first quarter beat The Street, with growth in digital and mobile initiatives globally.

Our mobile money solution in Egypt goes from strength to strength.  As reported in MasterCard's quarterly results, Vodafone Egypt has added 2 million cash wallets onto MasterCard’s mobile gateway service.  Bringing digital payments to the masses and transforming lives in the process.

[williamdawson]

“ According to Ernst and Young, the Indian workforce will grow to 900 million strong by 2020. To put that in perspective, the American workforce, which is the third largest in the world, comes in at just under 160 million people.” 

(via India Population Growth Means It Will Soon Have the Largest Workforce - Fortune)

[williamdawson]

"While 400 million people in India borrowed money over the last year, only one in seven of these were approved for a loan by a bank. The remaining debtors had to use informal, unregulated services often with extortionate interest rates."

Another reason for MoneyOnMobile, providing transparent and easy access to financial services for all of India.