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In your experience, do you think others still lag behind Kenya in terms of adoption and, if so, why?
Congrats on Nala. I've been building digital money/crypto apps and platforms since 2013: Uphold, Airtm, among others.
I have some ideas that you might find interesting/helpful:
1. Have you considered offering non-native assets that are superior stores of value than local fiat, such as USD? Airtm has been doing that for the past 3 years in LatAm and we have an easy-to-integrate API that would allow you to offer USD pay-ins/outs via your platform.
2. Airtm also enables P2P exchange between local money and airusd and by extension any two local currencies. Since you are representing multiple assets in one place (as I understand the product) that might be interesting for those holding multiple currencies.
3. Airtm could offer very low-cost USD remittance directly to your users in USD from the US (this month) and all of the EU (next month). So Nala users could recieve USD with Airtm, offboard as local money as needed.
4. I'm leading an effort to build an open source system of smart contracts for P2P crypto/fiat (and by extension fiatfiat exchange (air protocol) which would enable Nala to offer its own P2P fiat/fiat exchange without relying on Airtm directly.
Please reach out when you have some time. I'd love help you guys grow.
Congrats again.
Regards,
Tim
Regarding mobile payments in general, it seems Kenya/M-Pesa is always the standard that people refer to but we don't hear much about mobile payment adoption in other African countries. In your experience, do you think others still lag behind Kenya in terms of adoption and, if so, why?
Kenya is definitely the country where mobile money is used the most, but we are seeing other countries catching-up quickly. There are two fantastic studies that we’ve been using quite a bit:
1) The World Bank Findex study has 2014 and 2017 stats on the percentage of the population that has executed a mobile money transaction. You’ll see that 7 countries have a ~40% or greater value (Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Gabon, Namibia, Ghana, and Tanzania) and that adoption has increased quite a bit between 2014 and 2017. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/global-financial-i...
2) GSMA has really great intelligence as well. Check-out the dataset on the site: https://www.gsma.com/mobilemoneymetrics/#global?y=2018?v=ove...
As you have a very user centric approach, how do you deal with data collection? Think Analytics on behavior as well as other data driven decisions. Do you keep buckets of data in the offline app and send them out as soon as a device has an internet connection again?
Hey Benjamin-- Congrats on Nala. I've been building digital money/crypto apps and platforms since 2013: Uphold, Airtm, among others. I have some ideas that you might find interesting/helpful: 1. Have you considered offering non-native assets that are superior stores of value than local fiat, such as USD? Airtm has been doing that for the past 3 years in LatAm and we have an easy-to-integrate API that would allow you…