Faizan Siddiqi A lot of talk has been on going and various claims have been made that Cashless/Mobile payments will lift the economy into its renaissance and document a lot of things that are in the grey today. All great banter, but concrete steps seem to be missing as to how the various 100 day actions or … Read more
Think of it as the Uberization of mmmm Content. (Sorry Careem, you still need to build Careem Food Delivery and some other things to play catchup or out Uber, Uber in some other regional/clever ways.(Payments??) The average media company will not be able to compete with Uber or Careem given the war chest of funding … Read more
I suspect you know what the top 20 free apps are on the Pakistani App Store? Go on, guess. WhatsApp? Uber? Facebook Messenger? All solid guesses – but there is a surprise entrant, at least for me and is already wreaking havoc on the charts. Its 20 on the Apple App Store and 9 on … Read more
Our friends from across the border are carefully rolling out a well thought out strategy for growth in Pakistan. Whilst they have access to human capital at scale in China, yet as they come across the border some surprises await. No one buys into e-commerce plays and banking(payments) for letting it run on welfare. Clearly … Read more
The writing is on the wall. We just got bail out funds from Xi, its not a bad thing. Who else would underwrite the plundering of all our combined leadership or the lack thereof. “China comes with a lot of money and says you can borrow this money,” Dr. Mahathir said in an interview before the … Read more
Before you start reading. I urge you to watch the above first to get the context. If you cant relate to it. Dont read further. In the summer of 2017 I put out a survey based on the request from all those friends, colleagues, family members professional acquaintances and aspirants from the Pakistani diaspora who … Read more
There’s a lullaby for suffering And a paradox to blame But it’s written in the scriptures And it’s not some idle claim Every month, every week, every day, someone is hell bent on asking, probing or claiming something to do with a payments play. I say “stop it.” The answer is self evident. Like … Read more
It truly is complicated, every one just graduated from MAU(Monthly Active Users) to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and now on to Blockchain. (Formerly known as Block Chain). We are still catching up on financial inclusion. Before we get in to Artificial Intelligence lets talk about basic intelligence or due diligence. With news daily of X “local” … Read more
Every day when people wake up in Silicon Valley, they get up , set eyes on their mission and get going to deliver on their vision. This btw is not only limited to California but from Tel Aviv to New Delhi and from Jakarta to Sao Polo all the places that are going places have … Read more
TL;DR; NBU(New Bankable Users) + E-commerce + Payments + Logistics. Did the big guys really miss this? Move over ad-tech, the ride hailing guys may just have a better handle on this one. Here are the thick big published statistics. An addressable population of 210M+. Roughly 125M people under 30 years of age. 60M smart … Read more