Its Complicated. The curious case of Fintechs, Banks and Asma.

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” company meeting Y “foreign” company and productive and constructive meetings + now news of strategic partnerships etc is very interesting, but has any one really looked at the fundamentals of taking financial services to the un banked? Or to grow financial services access beyond where they are.

To this date as an individual I cant plug in to any National Registry API to do citizen lookup or verification. So If I/any one else wanted to build an app to verify some ones ID, we cant actually do that. Happy to pay a service fee to do that lookup(Binary, Y/N). Why is that not possible? Why is public data not publicly available? For a fee of course, if it is, why isn’t this info public and being advertised nationally? Forget big data, we cant even get small data sorted out.

Data is going to be king even in Pakistan soon enough, so as a paying customer of the National Registry why can they offer enterprise services and access control and bio metric services? when I cant build my own, especially when as a citizen I’ve paid for the cost of building that system by taxes and fees. What happened to my right to access information and build services on top? Basically the state has decided it wants to be in that business hence it will not be good for the ecosystem long term(Discussion for a different day). But what that means is, innovation beyond the state paid actors and Telcos and Banks is really limited because the average App developer cant get to it via API or build innovative services that linked to identity in any way. Banks may/maynot allow you to interconnect with their APIs to run some of these verifications but that’s a walled garden approach. Rest assured, Scammers and the other lot don’t need API access they have and will continue to thrive by figuring out simple exploits. That truly is why its complicated, because it is fairly simple to counter these exploits but no one seems to be paying attention.

No less the real issue is with the floating copies of ID cards every where, god knows what happens to them when you give them to you bank or to you mobile operator or to the travel agent or where ever else you use the hard copy version(Schools/Clubs/Real Estate/Wills/Contracts, etc). Or what they can be used for.

Fintechs and Banks cant grow up and expand till there is absolute consumer confidence that your information is secure and a consumer protection agency is on the hook for it along with the regulators, because at best their (Fintech/Banks) tech is dated more so the mentality. There are good people every where. Every time I had the mis fortune of going into a bank branch and or try to open a domestic “wallet” account the experience is less than pleasant. My opinion will change when my experience changes.

Maybe the bottom of the pyramid market where they(telcos/fintechs/banks) intend to service customers is not yet aware, but soon they will be, and if this(financial inclusion) grows at any exponential scale, then the problem will become bigger to rectify.

My confidence in third parties is at all time low, you should try to do the following test, borrow a secondary phone number from a friend (say from Maybelink, UffPhone, CpecMobile) then take your own ID and try to open say an account in the most popular recently 45% strategically partnered branchless banking product. A little birdy says you will be pleasantly surprised that you will be able to open an account as the SIM to ID check is not where its supposed to be.

(Again all this is hypothetical and no one is encouraging you or any other member of the public to do some thing they shouldn’t and this is purely an academic hypothesis)

Meaning if you took say a number from the other 3 Telcos, used your own NIC or some one else’s, likely you could open a brand spanking new account, that you could use to send “Asma” as many loads as she wanted or you wanted. Because the Sim + ID combination seemingly is not being validated by Asmas service provider.

Do you see a problem with that? No “Asma” is still single and will gladly take your money. As will any one else who has your ID and an unused phone #(on an other network), they can open a (insert “Asmas” favorite product here) account using your name and hypothetically make transactions, receive payments.

You can potentially reverse the experiment and the carriers and the products but the central idea is, Asma remains single because the suitors all addressing the wrong problem(s).

Maybe with all this hype and PR is just in time, may be there is a dire need to bring in vilayati(imported) tech to fix digital payments/fintech/banking because truly its not ours to solve. Maybe Asma is also tired of all the local suitors, maybe its time for her to get serious and thats why she looked Eastwards to her Ant*.

2 thoughts on “Its Complicated. The curious case of Fintechs, Banks and Asma.”

  1. Financial inclusion is important, incentivise the nanwala and the rickshawala to digitize their payments..and transform informal economy into a documented one slowly and gradually. Agree that checks and balances need to made much better for people to trust the cashless payment system.

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