Can you give us a summary of what Fastacash is and its role within the payments industry?
fastacash is a fast-growing global fintech company. We are an innovator in the field of ‘Social Payments’, bridging the gap between – on one hand – payment and value transfer capabilities, and on the other – social media and messaging applications. This includes cross-border transfers, remittances and merchant payments. Via our technology, we enable these through social media and messaging apps.
We reach millions of consumers through our partners —banks, remittance companies, mobile operators, payments service providers, and digital wallet providers, among others. We work with B2C players to bring our technology to end consumers. We are agnostic in that we enable end consumers to send and receive any type of payment and transfer, be it e-money, coupons, airtime et cetera, across multiple social and messaging channels. We are not limited to a single country, geography, social medium and payment or partner type.
Consumers are moving to mobile devices and social and messaging applications. With this shift, so too are their usage and behavioral patterns. Financial institutions and existing players need to adopt new ways to cater to this evolution in consumer behavior, and social and messaging channels need to deliver additional value for their consumers. With our partners, we integrate our technology into their services, enabling their users to transact and make payments through social.
Why did you Fastacash recently partner with Cellum?
Cellum is a leading mobile wallet provider handling around two million monthly transactions. Through the partnership, Cellum opens up its mobile wallet capabilities to fastacash, complementing our own fintech capabilities. Moreover, Cellum’s solution is PCI DSS 3 Level 1 compliant – with its bank-grade security solutions covering mobile commerce, payments, as well as NFC technologies.
In addition, the integration of Cellum’s merchant base into fastacash’s will enhance the reach of our newly launched Request-to-Pay (RTP) service. RTP enables consumers to request their social connections to complete offline and online transactions on their behalf, facilitating e-gifts as well as enabling transactions to end-users who may not have access to banking and payment mechanisms.
With the partnership, fastacash can expand its geography across Asia, and Europe. This better positions us to expand our reach to the 4.8 billion people predicted to be using mobile devices by the end of 2016, as estimated by Forrester.
Cellum, meanwhile, can leverage our social payments technology, as well as our advanced User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) capabilities. They can extend these to their business partners, bringing innovation with security across four continents and to millions of end users.
How do you see the payments industry evolving over the next 5 years?
From our perspective, we are seeing – and will continue to see — greater innovation coming from the payments industry. Financial institutions and other incumbents risk becoming irrelevant if they do not innovate, offering consumers more convenient ways to transact.
Payment players will also focus on the user experience (UX), which is increasingly becoming a key competitive differentiator driving user engagement. While traditional banking is generations old, never before has there been as much evolution in the way people bank as in this last decade. And what’s causing this rapid shift is the improving functionalities and rapid proliferation of mobile devices. If you think about it, why do we need to que for hours at a bank when we have everything we need on our smartphones? Banks are realizing that and are spending resources on this aspect of their consumer’s experience – a trend which will only rise.
Lastly, we will see more and more financial institutions forging partnerships with smaller, and more nimble technological innovators, to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving financial services sector. These smaller, more nimble partners have the advantage of speed and innovation. What’s great is that through these partnerships, the experience for end consumers is one that gets more and more convenient.
What is Fastacash doing to stay ahead of the evolution?
Through continuous innovation and by harnessing technical know-how, paired with industry-leading user experience design, we have developed a modular scalable platform that delivers simple, and secure, payment transactions. This includes money, coupons, tokens of value, airtime etc. across 24 social networks; all enabled via one secure integration. With innovation at our base, as well as our modular approach, we can quickly adapt to a changing market.
Beyond this, our competitive advantages draw from an innovation-first approach. At fastacash, we foster creativity and innovation across the company, across departments – from engineering, design, operations to sales and marketing. We work closely with our partners to ensure that we have an in-depth understanding of their consumers’ needs. From there we build products to best meet these needs. Together with these partners, we are leading fintech disruption, removing barriers which exist today and enabling payments across social and messaging apps.
What sets Fastacash apart from other social payment based companies?
What sets us apart is our technological innovation and security, our partnerships, our drive to constantly build better UI/UX, our co-marketing efforts, our senior leadership team, and our global vision and partners.
Our premise is simple – if I can send a photo to you over WhatsApp, why can’t I send you money or any other value for that matter? That’s what we have done with our technology; in the process we are reshaping the global payments and remittance market via social and messaging networks. Moreover, we partner with leading global partners – the likes of Axis Bank and Oxigen in India, leading global money transfer player Xpress Money, and most recently Cellum. We jointly bring to market social payment services that meet highly stringent bank-grade standards. Aside from enabling social payments, a key part is ensuring our product is convenient and easy for consumers to use – which is where our focus to build better user interfaces and simplify the user experience has been key to building traction.
We are helmed by a very senior leadership team, most with over 15 to 20 years’ experience each across payments, finance, and the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) sectors. Our management team is supported by some of the brightest staff, which has been crucial to our success.
Our people, ideas, technology, and implementation speed makes us an ideal partner to the likes of banks, financial institutions, telecommunications companies, and social networks.