(4 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
Loading ...Salman Ansari, CEO of SATC, talks about the big picture and how the telco-and-bank-agnostic model will actually make ePayments a reality. A BIG reality. Pass the word around to bank heads along with telcos; the young entrepreneurs and insurance companies – Any and all stakeholders who want to learn how to turn this cloud into a practical reality, must tune in!
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 copy.jpg "CIPE Hammad Siddiqui")
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I find this blog luckily today when I was browsing ciopakistan after quite a long time and tell you I am really happy to see this
Enabling mPayment or mCommerce or whatever you name it is the need of time. Especially in our scenario where we have already lost a lot of time in pursuing the standard most of the world is already enjoying, I think it is must for us to go with the most latest and most challenging yet giving the edge on everything else technologies, immediately.
Thank you Salman for presenting it for us.
Ijaz
I am glad that there is resonance in the pain that I feel about missed opportunities. If all of us can pull together as the ‘civil society’ which is taken as faceless sheep and used the benefit of a few, we can bring about a change.
With the power of the Internet and the Media, we just may be able to be herd without having to sell our souls to the devil by becoming Politicians and indulge in critical compromises!
Sir – I attended your session at the recent Cio YearAhead conference in Karachi and was impressed to hear your views being made so boldly and publicly in front of stakeholders.I think it is just this honesty and harshness that needs to be heard. Linking your words to this video, I think you have rightly pointed out that there are many things that can be donee, but are not because the perspective of the end consumer is always missed out. We are never the center of the telecom company’s focus so if we don’t mean millions of rupees worth of instant revenue, we are obviously not worth investing in immediately.
What they are not realizing is this. If 40 million people transact even 1 rupee every day, that is 40 million more rupees of transcations being done each day. Multiply that with an average of 30 days in the month, and there are more zeros than I can fit in a calculator. Look at the contribution to the GDP. Look atthe contribution to transparent and measureable accounting practices. Look at the power of the people. everyday there is a news piece about how we are in debt and running out of money. People are losing jobs and we are unable to unfreeze the funds htat are stuck in the budgets tied up with every company. Why can mobile transcations in micro amounts, be enabled? It’s all about numbers. Whether or not we have anything else in this country, one thing we can ALWAYS count on, is large numbers of people.
Thank you for sharing your views.
I have just tried to bring the different ideas into one string of thought for a detailed study and discussion. I truly believe that we are at the threshold of getting a new paradigm in place for Pakistan and if successful, we this can scale and be transferable to other developing countries.
The key issue will be that the regulators, cell phone companies and the banks take off their blinkers and get together to pull this off.
If some key people in these industries want it, I can elaborate further to make this a reality.
Salman Sahab has done a marvelous job in educating our bureaucrat’s and the Mobile Companies here.. let’s see if any thing good happens out of it.
Thank u Salman Shab.
Regards,
Muneeb Iqbal
Salman Ansari is correct in seeing the lack of a cross-platform automated clearing house – electronic fund transfer (ACH/EFT) capabilities as the single biggest impediment to telecom-enabled growth in Pakistan. He is also correct in declaring that the technical expertise for building such an ACH/EFT system is available from numerous sources in Pakistan. He deserves a bigger audience for his views on the taxation of the telecom sector and the widespread negative impacts such taxation exercises.
His vision of scratch-card pre-paid cards to recharge accounts dovetails the approach that the developers of eTrade’s online bank and I were working on for OIC-member countries. Under the ‘CardWorking’ brand [TM – all rights reserved] we sought to extend that capability to include the option of using automated teller machines (ATM) as centres for recharging and paying out from online accounts. The withdrawal of our ATM partner has put that effort on hold, but the concept is both valid and incontrovertibly inevitable.
Access to cellular and Internet-enabled ACH/EFT systems offers benefits for small-business-owners and individuals who may be locked into economic relationships that disproportionately benefit third parties because of a lack of transparency or identity-management capabilities. For example, farmers with access to price information could select crops, buyers, and sales prices on more favorable terms than if they were left in the dark.
Where I am prepared to take issue with Salman Ansari’s vision is in the area of identity management. Universal, portable, telephone-number-based identities are inherently unstable and extend the identity-management system away from financial institutions that may ultimately be responsible for fraud from ACH/EFT transactions tied to individual telephone numbers.
As the holder of the rights to the new international .tel city codes for Karachi and Islamabad, I see telephone numbers as transitory and often unverifiable for the purposes of financial transactions and by extension for financial institutions as a whole. We currently see enough ongoing fraud in pre-paid cellular balance transfers in Pakistan to warn us about the risks if larger amounts of money are associated with telephone numbers.
Government attempts to limit local handset and SIM card sales to resident Pakistanis with verifiable identities have been abject failures — and I have the handsets to prove it. So what is the alternative?
The process of fixing, associating and managing identities with financial accounts needs to remain with financial institutions that maintain liabilities in the event that financial transactions go awry. Whether a new financial institution, clearinghouse and (separately perhaps) an indemnification system may be set up to handle micropayment or cellular-enabled transactions is a separate issue.
Individual telephone numbers, as numbers, are fast becoming obsolete. In their place, we are moving to institute identity management systems that enable cellular subscribers to secure their identities regardless of their mobile provider, financial institution, or mobile number. The speed of change is increasing. So are the complexities of identity management. ACH/EFT systems, financial institutions and telecom providers need to look towards the future.
Salman Ansari presents his case for a new telecom-enabled payment system lucidly and brilliantly. Relevant government officials will hopefully listen and seek to find out more information. The comments above are meant only as clarifications and not to discourage a robust and immediate implementation of Salman Ansari’s proposals.
good stuff man… i like.
Awesome stuff!
Waiting for interview of Shakir Ullah Afridi.
It’s economies of scale – I don’ t think the associations or even the state bank of pakistan has bothered to look at enabling an epayment system from teh consumer perspective. If they did, we wouldn’t STILL be talking about something so obvious.
And thank God that MNP can be used for something other than transferring over a number from one service provider to another. that takes a long time to go into effect anyway.
So now that we have this and the stakeholders and a plan, what next?