The second decade of the twenty-first century will be the “Mobile Decade”. There is no question about that. Throughout the globe, banks and others are churning out cell fee applications (amongst others, of course) at a velocity that has become so rapid that it is increasingly more difficult to keep up. In a phrase, the pace of alternate has come to be “dizzying”.
In Africa, the cell smartphone is seen as the tool that could convey a lot right, cost-effectively, and hastily to this long-suffering continent. A famous application for this surprise device is Migrant Worker Remittances and Small Price Payments.
Amid all this exhilaration, there are but shadows on the horizon. And if these capability troubles aren’t addressed, they could end up showstoppers. These problems are what I together term “Driver Issues”. As I stated, there are two of them; “Technology Drivers” and “Regulatory Drivers”. Let me explain.
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Leading part traits, especially within the banking industry, tend to be driven by technologists. Banks had been early adopters of Information Technology. Way lower back in the 1960s and Seventies, banks noticed the plain advantages of the computer, initially for account and statistics processing, and unexpectedly became the enterprise’s biggest customers of this new way of doing business and processing transactions.
Anything that could automate the processing, storage, and retrieval of big amounts of transactional data became certain to be a massive hit – and it became! So it turned logical that as the years passed, any new generation or application became quietly previewed to the banking enterprise. As a person heavily involved in R&D in digital banking returned in the 1980s, we have been continuously approached by the “large guys” and many smaller builders who had solutions to issues they requested to locate. It has become an awful lot of an enterprise shaggy dog story about “solutions searching out issues”.
In this manner, we have been exposed to new technology and procedures such as contactless cards, far-off banking (earlier than the Internet and the PC), smart playing cards, biometrics (fingerprint and iris), touchtone banking, long earlier than the final products were ever announced never thoughts rolled out.
What the Technology providers had accomplished changed into an informal partnership with the economic enterprise, using them as a sounding board and a concept generator for brand-new merchandise and procedures. In other words, the banking industry in the fields of generation and information processing has been actively pushed by the era that legitimately had been developing their destiny sales through this casual partnership. Nothing is incorrect with this, as the banks have still been very customer-pushed. I say this because, in those days, the financial institution-consumer interface had a human face.
We saw our clients as real flesh and blood human beings, and then consumers noticed the teller or the mortgage clerk as the personification of the financial institution. The problem, of course, is that this technology-pushed technique has persisted from the vendor facet. Today, however, the banks typically seem to have largely forgotten that customers are humans. To banks nowadays, customers have emerged as digital impulses on the other facet of a far-flung interface, be it an ATM, a PC, or a cellular smartphone.
In the case of Migrant Worker Remittances, these troubles and desires are two-fold. They are normally called “First and Last Mile” problems. The “First Mile” refers to the issues the sender faces in anything he’s running into. These problems range from a lack of fluency in the local language, no longer know-how of local customs, a loss of formality such as being an illegal immigrant, or things like no longer understanding how to ship cash.
“Last Mile” troubles relate to issues that the home receiver faces, which are often similarly daunting. These problems range from the truth that the receiver won’t have a bank account, or there can be excessive prices on the extraordinarily low remittance, or the recipient may need to journey for actual days to gather a small amount from the closest bank branch.
