In rural regions of the developing world, healthcare facilities are quite sparse. The provision of regular healthcare is done by healthcare workers associated to the government or a non-profit hospital who serves one or more catchment of villages. The healthcare workers receive 2 years of training. Because of their workload, the diversity of issues they encounter, and not enough training, the quality isn't ideal leading to non-institutional deliveries and high childhood morbidity in cases of missed high risk pregnancies, missed immunisation schedules for the newly born kids etc. I developed an open source system Avni with an offline first app because of unreliable or non-existent internet connectivity for the healthcare workers to assist them with identifying high risk pregnancies by accounting for 300+ different factors which can lead to it, keeping track and record of immunisation schedules for kids in the villages, and provide adolescent care to teenagers in schools. Avni currently is being used by more than 10 non-profit institutions, between them covering 100+ villages in India.
Describe the biggest opportunity area you see in this mission to transform financial resilience in the next 10 years and why you are the person to have impact in it.
In a 2021 survey by Pay.UK, 35% of the SMBs claimed, the biggest challenge they face is card costs, second biggest one being reconciliation. UK is an SMB backed economy where SMBs are responsible for 53% of the GDP and 61% of employment in the country. A common trend across countries has been first to develop a fast money transfer infrastructure and then building a domestic scheme on top of it to use for small/medium retail transactions. A pattern which has repeated itself across multiple countries, like Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, India, Norway, Sweden, Denmark etc, where all the banks came together to form an association of banks to make a domestic scheme around the proposition of minimal transaction fee and instant access to liquidity to replace the card schemes like Mastercard and Visa. UK has FPS, US has RTP and EU passed a proposal to have instant EUR->EUR transfers by 2024. Despite the advancement in the banking infrastructure card remain the most penetrated means of payments in UK, EU and US, which exact a heavy toll on small and medium-sized businesses. The trend in the next decade is going to be alternative payment methods and schemes gaining more market penetration vs cards, just because they are cheaper, modern and offer instant liquidity. The schemes keep getting richer while small retail merchants lose a massive part of their margins in just card acceptance costs.
I want to create a global payment scheme and an open standard which will be based around the principal of never charging interchange to the businesses vs, just operating on a very minimal sub-£10 pa fixed fee structure, which uses the underlying fast transfer infrastructure. I have quite a lot of experience just working in the payment industry at Wise, and building the first 100% cloud based issuance processing system. I also understand the incentives for the banks to adopt such a scheme based off of their economics of their card programmes. I am quite passionate and mission driven towards fixing the biggest challenges faced by SMBs in the financial market globally, and offer a sustainable replacement of the archaic and rent-seeking card schemes.
##Challenges
What are the biggest hurdles you’ll need to overcome in order to build a successful business within this mission?
Solving this is going to be a daunting task. To make a case for banks to accept and integrate in a new payment scheme, a case will need to be made for this, by presenting number of merchants accepting the new payment scheme and also additional incentives for them to counter the scheme's interchange fees they receive.
Scaling and convincing small and medium businesses to start accepting this, and integration with their current Point of Sale machines won't be an easy task either.
Incentivising the customers to use the alternative method of payment instead of their cards or wallets and educating the customers on the usage is also going to be quite challenging.