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This conversation is moderated by David Kleiman, Managing Director, and Joep Roest, Business Development Manager, of WING.  WING partners with VisionFund Cambodia (an MFI) as an agent.  Veasna Chumsam, Business Initiative Manager at VisionFund, is also participating.

WING is a mobile payments provider (wholly owned by ANZ Bank) that offers customers a mobile wallet with which they can transfer money and buy goods and services, including airtime. When we launched in January 2009, we partnered with MFIs to leverage their network of branches. We currently operate 600 agents in all 24 provinces of Cambodia. Agents perform a number of functions such as cash in, cash out and customer registration. We have attracted 160,000 customers.

Why we partnered with MFIs
When WING launched there were no existing retail networks we could leverage. The only organizations that had the required provincial presence were the MFIs. We engaged with VisionFund early on in the development of the WING service prior to launch. VisionFund is part of World Vision International and was the MFI that was forward looking enough to see the opportunity. They provided us with an instant network at launch. We launched with 8 of their branches and soon after increased to 26 Vision Fund branches – and 17 branches from other MFIs.

The first step is to use the MFI branches as agents.  Our roadmap for MFI partnership includes facilitating loan collection, disbursement and deposit taking. We plan to develop the other areas later once we had made our organizations familiar with each other and once we had enough capacity to pursue these opportunities properly.

Successes
·    We work with 26 of their 87 branches
·    Smooth process between the two businesses
·    Clear roadmap outlining next steps

Challenges
•    The commission earned by VisionFund on registration and cash-in and cash-out has not been significant.  For them to really see more benefit from cooperation, we need to move into higher value areas of the partnership such as loan collection and disbursement.  They expect to experience significant cost savings through enhanced efficiency of collections once this has started.

•    Perception that there is a lack of capacity to perform WING transactions

•    Differing motivation between the full-time WING Pilots (who are trained to sign up customers and paid commissions on those sales) and Vision Fund staff who are salaried and thus not clearly incentivized to fully cross-sell and promote WING.

Questions for Discussion:
1.  What compelling reasons do you see for an MFI to act as an agent for a mobile money implementation?
2.  Besides acting as an agent, how can the relationship be developed to add more value to both parties?
3.  Recognizing that the relationship is part of a road map - when is the right time to move to the next phase?