Payments ain’t a thang!
It’s mid-January and I am finally getting around to unpacking from my Christmas week in Romo, Denmark. The first time I went to Romo was August of 2017. It was beautiful. It reminded me of a Scandinavian version of Cape Cod.
The first hour of driving onto the island I noticed honesty boxes selling locally produced goods. The boxes were typically near a farm or house and on sale were potatoes, honey or jam and you could pick what you wanted and pay for the goods, via cash, by placing it in the box. Sustainability at it’s best! The next day I saw another one of those honesty boxes, this time at the Butcher shop. But there was something very different about this honesty box. You would pay with something other than cash. Huh?! How can an unmammed (or woman) stall accept cards? Do you leave your card there? Do you write down your card details? Do you write a check? Do they send you an invoice?
Oh no, you pay with Mobile Pay! There was a sticker on that box that had a 8 digit Mobile Pay number. This served as the merchants ID code. So you opened up the app, entered the amount to pay, the 8 digit code and boom, you had your jam and the merchant was paid. I canbuy locally produced goods, at a time convenient for me, without cash. Nice.
This really stuck with me. I had researched SWISH, VIPPS and Mobile Pay for years now and had seen the P2P component before but to actually see how this has changed the P2B world was pretty cool.
So back to my unpacking and I found the handout from the Christmas Mass I went to on Romo. On the 23rd of December (despite none of us being Protestants or even religious) we went to the Romo Church for a Christmas Mass.
They gave everyone a piece of paper which aided us in singing along (in our best Danish). When I turned the paper around, low and behold, Mobile Pay once again made an appearance. Below the area discussing the collections is information on how you can donate via Mobile Pay.
On a side note, the Church didn’t believe in passing around a collections bucket, instead, people went up and put their money into the bucket so that donations could remain anonymous. You have to love Dane’s right?!
Seeing this in the Church really demonstrated how deep mobile payments are embedded in Danish society. But there was one more instance I noticed the ability to pay with Mobile Pay and this was just really something. A little Christmas market in one of the Danish towns had a carousel ride. Of course, you could pay with Mobile Pay!
For fintechies and of course people in payments this is pretty impressive. The obvious conclusion is that Denmark, like Norway and Sweden, is on it’s way to becoming a cashless society.
But there is another conclusion here. This entire experience was taken in a remote part of Denmark. I mean, this is how remote we are talking:
Innovation isn’t necessarily driven by big cities, millennials, smartphones and where the big banks are. Innovation is driven by society. Thinking specifically at payments, successful solutions have either fixed a collective societal pain (e.g. WeChat, Venmo, m-Pesa) or has been built around the way a society just is (Vipps, Swish, Mobile Pay, PayTM, Tikkie).
A Mobile Pay would never work in Berlin, despite it being a hotbed for fintech innovation and a vibrant city for young people. Why? Because Berliners are so secretive about their data, don’t rate the banks high and like to do things “old school.” Also, payment card acceptance rates are ridiculously low (I always have to have cash on me).
A Tikkie would never work in London or Dublin, Anglos are more “round driven” when it comes to ordering at bars as in “I got this round of drinks, you get the next one.” If the round balance is unequal it tends to work itself out and people don’t request the cost of 2 beers the next day like in the Netherlands, where people like going Dutch.
For startups and banks alike, there have never been more opportunities to rapidly develop and launch new, truly digital products and services. When developing new solutions, especially within payments, it is important to take inspiration from the winners like Monzo, Venmo, TransferWise, and WeChat Pay. However, it is equally, if not more, important to truly think about your target segment and, where you can, build based on a Customer Jobs-To-Be Done- Framework. You’ll find the painpoints and little things about a society truly come out and you will be on the path to success.
If you are interested to hear more about my payments knowledge or want to pick my brains on anything fintech, drop me an email on: digitalmagss@gmail.com
