“Huawei is the leader when it comes to banking and wallet solutions available in the marketplace. JazzCash has a very strong relationship with Huawei Technologies as JazzCash has continuously been supported by Huawei,” this was expressed by Ahmed Shahab Nasir, CTO at JazzCash Pakistan. Shahab was talking to Teletimes International in an exclusive interview during Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona.
He said, “I could not begin to imagine if my core platform was not this robust, if it was not this stable. I would never be able to focus on my agility and other time to market for my products so easily if I even have to worry about the availability of my core platform. So my core platform is very good because Huawei has a tremendous solution. It’s not something that I need to be persuaded for, and it’s something I’m pretty convinced of. I’ve used other wallets in the past.” “If you look at my career, it’s the fourth mobile wallet platform I’m working on, so I can put a very easy comparison between the four platforms that I’ve been using and clearly, Huawei is the leader when it comes to banking and wallet solutions available in the marketplace,” he added.
Teletimes’ questions and Shahab’s responses are presented below for the interest of readers.
Question: What are the unique needs of Pakistani consumers when it comes to mobile wallets and financial inclusion?
Answer: If you look at Pakistan, about 110 million adult population is unbanked today. For a normal Pakistani person who is unemployed or has a job that is not listed as an approved job, it’s very difficult for them to open a bank account in a traditional bank. How we are changing this situation is by offering a bank to everyone. What we have been doing is banking the unbanked people.
If you look at the volumes of people that we have been able to bank in the last couple of years; we have 15 million active customers today, more than 15 million in fact. And rest of the country’s entirety in totality has 34 million, including us. If you remove all these FinTech like Telenor EasyPaisa and other smaller players, rest of the industry does not even offer 6-7 million wallets, so we are the biggest contributors here.
Question: Where do the majority of the people belong to? The rural areas or urban areas?
Answer: In fact, the rural area never had any option, so, they only rely on JazzCash mostly. Many people in rural Pakistan have opened an account with JazzCash or another FinTech competitor. But in the urban area now it’s very popular because our payment portfolio has enhanced tremendously. We have over 2000 thousand merchants who accept payments in form of JazzCash. So that’s a change in driving factor.
Question: How can mobile wallets like JazzCash help to fill the gaps in Pakistan’s financial landscape? And what do you think are the benefits of using a mobile wallet over traditional methods such as cash or cards?
Answer: As we are basically banking the unbanked, the biggest thing that we are doing for the economy is converting cash into digital money. So every year if you look at the number, we are converting more than 800 billion PKR from cash; money that is otherwise floating as physical money, is now being used in e-wallets. So that’s the biggest favor we are doing to the society in general, number one. Number two is, of course, we are offering banking for everyone, we do not discriminate over who you are, your profession or other factors which traditional banks consider but we do not discriminate on such factors.
Question: In addition to my previous question, what do you think is the potential for FinTech in Pakistan?
Answer: It’s huge, it’s growing and it’s flourishing like anything, I think we already have a huge base of customers. What’s more important is that we need to focus on giving users more reasons to spend through their wallet instead of doing cash transactions. In general, I think the potential to grow in terms of revenue is ten times in the next two to three years. This is the kind of potential that I certainly see in terms of revenue, in terms of growth, we will still grow maybe 20% to 30%. Growth is very easy for next one year or two years in terms of wallets. And of course, the major transformation will be occurring when we are actually moving our legacy customers from the old traditional channels of USSD to digital channels of a mobile app. This is the biggest transformation which is happening very recently. We have doubled the mobile app users last year and we will double it again this year.
Question: How important do you think is it for companies like JazzCash to support initiatives like financial inclusion?
Answer: We are all about financial inclusion. This is the only thing – this is our agenda. This is the shout that we take since day one and we are complying with this shout. Also, people appreciate us for the same reason.
Question: Are there any other areas where JazzCash could help to promote financial inclusion in Pakistan?
Answer: Moving forward, maybe it would be something in insurance sector, in tech sector. These are the areas whereby we should be able to assist our customers in the future. And right now the focus is of course to grow further and further into lending. We want people to be able to take loans where and when needed. It should be very easy to access.
Question: What challenges do you see in terms of expanding mobile wallet in JazzCash usage?
Answer: The change in regulations. The regulatory body plays a very important role when it comes to this thing. So the regulatory body will keep on coming up with new policies all the time. Until today, so far, very recently, we have been able to successfully drive these changes in the policy itself, so we are very close to the policymaker now. We do push them and do give them the right direction which will support the business to grow customers, to be able to access the money. So if these policymakers stay in the support of letting these kinds of businesses grow and their agenda is the same as ours, which is financial inclusion, it should be okay.
Question: What else do you see happening in the FinTech space in Pakistan in the next few years?
Answer: In the next few years, I think the biggest thing that is happening is the “Raast” program. Raast is one of the initiatives by the central bank again and what they’re trying to do is simplify the journey in terms of instant transfers. They want to make it mandatory for all the banks to support instant transfers and in general, Pakistani banking industry looks good in the coming future.
