The mobile money industry is literally exploding from a current global market value of approximately $13 billion (excluding retail and hardware) to an estimated $280+ billion by 2018, suggesting a 2000% growth in market size during the next 5 years. This market is therefore rife with disruptive strategies and technology and offers countless business opportunities. Inevitably, this will be followed by consolidation which implies now is the time to play.
Does IT is a mobile money solution vendor based in Cape Town South Africa. The unique selling point (USP) of Does IT is a competitive portfolio (and more) which is specifically positioned to counter daunting obstacles all prospective mobile money operators or businesses face: Cost and time to market. TechMoran caught up with the Does IT team and this is what they told us.
When was it launched and where?
Does IT was launched in November 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Who are the founders?
The founders are, Kobus Smit, Johan Meyer and Nicky Human.
What problem does it solve?
Millions upon millions of our fellow Africans do not have access to bank accounts. While this complex situation is caused by many different factors, the important matter remains that the increasing unbanked population in Africa and everywhere else in the world, not only creates a substantial socio-economic challenge for our people, but to industries as well as the respective governments.
The problem is mobile money software companies traditionally earmark their products and solutions to financial institutions or communication service providers, or they offer a service directly to the public (end users). Obtaining a copy of any of these solutions is however expensive with substantial license, maintenance and support, as well as infrastructure costs.
This current model therefore limits the uptake of mobile wallet usage as most prospective operators with the opportunity and desire to start such a service for their people and their customers are unable to do so due to startup costs.
The unique selling point (USP) of Does IT therefore, is a competitive portfolio (and more) which is specifically positioned to counter daunting obstacles all prospective mobile money operators or businesses face: Cost and time to market.
How does it work?
Our primary goal is to facilitate market penetration through ease of establishment at exceptionally low cost. This will enable a much quicker and much further reach into the most important market sector being the unbanked population of the world.
Our secondary goal is to establish mobile money as payment norm within the retail industry and we therefore added significant merchant features and are also working on a true cashless and card-less retail solution.
Our operator targets include traditional mobile money players such as communication service providers and financial institutions, but we believe that this service should be extended to include governments, manufacturing, construction, mining, health and insurance, retail in general and much, much more. Why?
Mobile money does not only bank the unbanked, but it offers significant revenue opportunities through access to untapped markets, over and above offering savings and risk containment and thus increasing profitability.
Does IT therefore offers its portfolio to prospective customers or operators as a branded, (private-) cloud, software as a service (SaaS) mobile money solution. This simple approach thus facilitates a highly competitive but very affordable service to our customers and allows more entities to establish a mobile money solution quickly and economically.
What exactly do you do?
Does IT was established in November 2012 by means of a product acquisition and the forming of a new company with a unique mobile money strategy and industry solution.
Since inception Does IT focused predominantly on redirecting the solution and portfolio with substantial R&D investment and at the same time doing selective marketing. The latter is done in order to establish strategic partnerships with prominent ICT service providers as well as to obtain initial customer engagements.
At the same time Does IT is focusing on broadening its exciting product road map to accommodate capabilities to enable penetration to untapped market sectors.
How many users so far?
Does IT is currently in discussion with a number of prospects within Africa. Given the various NDA’s committed to, Does IT is alas not permitted to share more details at present apart from confirming that a 1st deployment is pending and due to be launched shortly.
What is your business model?
Our business model is explained in detail on our site at: http://www.does-it.com/ourbusinessmodel.html
Any competition in SA?
There are a few local mobile money players, example Fundamo (a VISA company), but we do not view them as competition as our business models are entirely different. Then again, even should some view us and other local vendors to be competitors, the market is so young and so big that there is space for everyone.
In fact, Does IT needs competition so we can learn as well as to keep Does IT growing its product road map in order to stay in touch with market and industry developments. This obviously benefits not only us, the vendor, but importantly does so for our customers.
How unique are you from them?
There is no other mobile money (SaaS) service like ours at present.
Our solution provides our immediate customers, the operators, with a branded, (private-) cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS) mobile wallet as well as supplementary products and features from our portfolio. Our value proposition in a nutshell therefore is:
– A competitive solution (nothing less, in fact …)
– Cost
- SaaS i.e. fixed fee per wallet and per supplementary service
- SaaS i.e. OPEX driven (refer taxation benefits)
- Cloud i.e. no CAPEX (again refer taxation benefits)
- Cloud i.e. exceptionally low hosting costs
- Limited implementation and customization i.e. limited costs …
- Automated cloud deployment
- Last but not least, for early bird customers, the 1st 1000 wallets or 6 months entirely FREE
– Time to market (refer all of the above)
This approach enables the operator to:
– Create a lucrative mobile money business based upon operational expenditure (OPEX) instead of capital expenditure (CAPEX) and thus address usual concerns related to
- Initial investment in software or R&D
- Hardware & other infrastructure investments
- Complex binding licensing & S&M contracts
- Complex charging mechanisms
- Substantial Time to Market which negatively affects return on investment
- Lack of expected governance and controls
- Taxation
– Manage the typical start-up stage profitability challenges by obtaining the wallet entirely FREE of charge (early birds)
– Manage the business and profitability completely independently from the vendor
– Partner with other Operators in the same country or other countries and immediately increase their collective user base accordingly
It is important to note that while our business model is entirely different to that of our competitors’, our product portfolio competes with the best solutions on the market and provides our end users with exactly the same capability, and more, than that of our competitors.
Any funding yet?
There is substantial interest from a number of private investors and other venture capital entities but at present Does IT plans to remain entirely self funded.
Challenges?
The fact that we offer a different commercial model to our competition implies some effort on our part to make prospects understand this different way of working. In fact, for some it is almost too good to be true …
