Recent past has seen Pakistan emerge as one of the fastest growing country in Mobile Money sector. According to the State Bank of Pakistan newsletter of Q3, 2015, the industry surpassed its own M-Wallets projections by reaching 13.2m accounts, a growth of 21.2% in a single quarter. This shows a slight shift in the customer behavior as they are now getting more used to and accustomed to M-Wallets. Awareness level is increasing, customers are now more comfortable using mobile wallets and understand the functionality and benefits of using this service. MFS operators are also promoting it on a large scale with the high level objective of financial inclusion and breaking monopoly of the retail channel.
On the other side, development is also rapidly taking place on Payment gateway, NFC and E-commerce. Easypaisa and Mobicash (Recently rebranded as JazzCash) are the front runners in introducing innovative technologies to its customers and retailers. Easypaisa recently did a NFC awareness campaign by introducing heavy discounts at leading food outlets if payments is made through easypaisa mobile wallet through NFC. This had a major impact with customers rushing to get hold of the NFC tag and placing it on their mobile phones. Easypaisa also partnered with Daraz.pk and did a massive campaign for Black Friday. This also went highly successful with customers thronging to the site to buy out their intended items at heavy discounts through easypay.
Mobicash has also made inroads in the industry by partnering with National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) and Ministry of Interior for Passport Payments. This has given huge convenience to the customers as they no longer have to wait in line to pay their passport fee. A transaction that took around 2 hours to complete can now be completed within 2-3 minutes at the conveniece of customer's own home.
The next focus area is cinema ticketing which is yet to be launched formally by any player.
Collections of government fee, challans, ticketing, online purchasing and NFC are the key areas these operators will have their eyes on. Keep watching this space for further updates !
