In the previous part , we went through the Cash-In process and it’s big impact on the mobile money service.
Also discussed The payment logical filter, and proposed the first alternative to enhance your Cash-In process by offering a unique service that can’t be purchased using Credit cards or Cash, now I will carry on directly and proceed with the other possible alternatives.
2- Promotions, Promotions and More Promotions!
One of the possible tricks to convenience the customer to use mobile wallet as payment method rather than traditional Credit Card or Cash, is to offer them a promotion, may be a certain discount or extra loyalty points. also the possibility to enter withdrawals and win some physical gifts or maybe they will be rewarded with some extra wallet balance to enforce them loop in the loop again, which should be considered as the optimum promotion style, as you will be trying to tie customer to your wallet more.
However this should work but it will not last, the sooner your promotion ends customers will slowly revert back to their traditional payment option, as Cash-In pain will come up again and the Logical filter test will miserably fail.
going with this option only works if you are really desperate concerning acquiring or attracting customers, but still you can go with this critical solution if you have professional sales and marketing teams, with communication and hot deals you may convenience your connected merchants to sponsor those promotions. This should attract customers and waive the added-on fees to the merchants side and grant you a good profit margin.
3- Pay it later!
Another approach is to allow customers to purchase via wallet with on credit option, this will generate you more traffic especially if your KYC bar is low. On the other hand this approach will dramatically increase the project risk factor.
You will be a victim for unlimited frauds, you will lose the main concept of online payment service, and you will find out that the solution has turned into a traditional bank system one by one. You will not need – and it won’t even make sense- to implement extra fancy or online solutions since your are not running in the online mode anymore.
However this approach is one of the possible scenarios to solve the Cash-In issue but I would vote for this as the worst approach, in the next approach and the upcoming” Do and Don’t article” I will explain why this methodology is not on my favorite list.
Still you can tweak it with a link with insurance companies, but as told before. Please avoid this way!
4- Back-end you wallet!
Personally I will always vote for this approach since it capitalize on the online concept, and it doesn’t force you to run endless promotions and shouldn’t change the risk level either in positive or negative way.
Back-end your wallet by linking it to a credit card number, bank account or any other saving account. And the ultimate is to back end your wallet to a payroll account. This will ensure a smooth and continued funding source of money to feed your wallet.
Once your fund source is granted, you have to focus on offering services to your customers, you will need to support your customer needs and try to lower the Cash-Out to the lowest possible count and put Zero Cash-Out as your major target.
And to make it work better you will need to follow the following rules,
- Ensure to offer rich and convenient interface, mobile APP, web site, USSD, SMS, IVR, WAP site and so on, less is more and eventually 2 channels is always a good start to be increased later
- Maintain the same experience if you will launch your wallet service with more than one channel, and in your planned upgrades, it’s a must to deliver the same upgrades across all channels all at a time
- You main target is force the money flow and resident balances or else silent accounts would be your biggest nightmare
- Your potential revenue and profit needs thousands transactions per day, therefore you have to focus on the money movement process and acquire new service regularly
- … to be continued
In the next article,
We will focus on the fourth option and highlight more “Do and Don’t rules” to ensure a successful and continued payment service.
Photo Credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Mobile_payment_03.JPG