Ben Kolesar: Launching Mobile Money in Africa One Country at a Time #25

Yeah, I mean, every launch is hard.

Every new country is hard, pretty much.

They all have their own challenges.

You would think that after a while, you would have enough momentum from one country to carry over to the next.

But for the most part, you are starting over each time.

And it's not always clear from the outset where we're going to be successful and where it's going to be a lot harder.

Um, and so, you know, the, like the biggest, uh, well, a couple of big challenges we always have are the trust issue.

Um, and then the, uh, the sort of chicken and egg problem, or you need those cash in and cash out agents in order to get users, but you also need users to, uh, retain those agents.

Um, and so every, every new country is a puzzle.

Um, and every new country.

Give me an

example.

We talked about Senegal and the fish traders.

Give me another example.

Yeah.

Um, so yeah.

Uh, like I would say that, you know, one of the, um, like one of the other interesting markets that was, uh, in some ways quite well, in many ways, quite different was the Gambia, um, where we were, uh, like it's, it's sort of, um, surrounded by three sides on Senegal.

Um, but we, we had a, like a particular challenge there where we were trying to get, um, transfers from the Gambia to Senegal because, um, You know, we already had a pretty big group of users in Senegal.

We got to the Gambia and found that there were actually already a bunch of wave agents there that we didn't know about.

They were They were essentially using the Senegal app in order to help people send money from the Gambia to Senegal.

And so we had to then convince these people who were charging quite a lot to charge a lot less in order to do WAVE in the proper formal way.

And then there were all of these challenges around the exchange rate that we set and the Basically, the treasury side of running that business.

So that was a whole other set of problems.

So to

convince people to use the Right Country app, you had to give them incentives because they were creating black markets using apps from...