Chris Manguera
Chris Manguera is the chief marketing officer of MYNT. He won the Mansmith Young Market Masters Awards in 2018 and shares here his insights on mobile money and the microlending business.
He will share more marketing tips during the 10th Market Masters Conference on April 3 at SMX Aura.
Q: Which market segments appear to be more open to cashless transactions and why?
A: In GCash, we see certain market segments that are attracted by the promise of mobile money. These segments see it as a means to have more savings—in terms of cost, time and effort. As digital payments allow more convenient and cost-efficient means to pay or transact, they see this as an opportunity to optimize their resources to channel them to more important things.
So far, we have seen two key segments that are becoming more open to mobile money. Big portion of this base are driven by the growing student population becoming more open to this technology. We see them using certain use cases like buy load (mobile top up at a discounted price) or purchase items online (usually with discount vouchers). We also see the behavior where they cash in or load up their mobile wallets by going to the convenience stores that are usually within their university. This is the case as there is lower banking penetration in this segment. We are also seeing growing use of “savings” or storing of their allowance securely in these mobile wallets. On the other hand, there is also growing demand for this service among young professional segment. They see the convenience of sending money to friends and family electronically more efficient while using same for bills payments and online payments like booking tickets, shopping or for travelling. They usually top up their wallets by linking their bank accounts into the mobile app for more seamless transactions.
What is nice to note is that there is also growth in user segments within rural areas where certain unbanked customers use the service to address certain barriers in remitting money home for their families, or using it to pay for their bills where it usually takes them a day just to travel and pay for electricity and water. That is why as a service, we assure a multichannel approach to serve various markets with different device types.
Q: What are the fundamental strategies to change payment behavior of your target market in favor of using mobile money?
A: For GCash, our strategy revolved around addressing three Cs of customers. First, we found out that for our service to be used often, it needs to truly deliver convenience. A lot of users during our user research are able to “compute” convenience when they start assessing cost over benefit of our offering. Cost for this matter is not only in monetary form but also the time and effort they need to invest. So the constant battle of GCash is to design a product that truly offers a simple way to load up your wallet, a maximum benefit by offering various services like buying load, booking movies, paying bills, purchasing online or offline (brick and mortar), getting credit, insurance and even investment products.
The next “C” is confidence. This is all about trust. Trust that can only be built with constant assurance of security of money in the wallet, assurance of availability when they need support or help, and assurance of offering the best service in the market.
The last “C” is community. For the cashless ecosystem to thrive, we need to enable payments across relevant use cases within the daily life of our customers. Community also stands for the network (family and friends). For mobile money to thrive, we need to build and enable social networks of our customers to sustain usage.
It matters that we address all three Cs to fully drive adoption customers to this technology.
Q: What success metrics do you track for mobile money?
A: Success metrics for mobile money companies in growth phase should not be all about revenue. As we focus our efforts on driving user adoption and assuring retention, we should monitor closely customer activity. In GCash, we look at monthly, weekly and even daily active users as these metrics give us an indication of relevance of service to the customers. This is the north star of our company as it measures impact we make to our customers.
Q: In this age of big data, mobile money can track wallet size and past purchase behaviors. What other ways can mobile money-linked marketing be used in the future?
A: It is true that mobile payments allow capture of various data points and we take this as a responsibility to further drive back value to the users we serve. As more customers leverage on their mobile phones to compare prices, see reviews, search for more information, or look for deals to make better shopping decisions, layering payments on top of these data points can fully optimize the purchasing experience of the customer. We usually leverage on data to allow more personalized offerings like matching the right promotion to the user or recommending next best merchant they can visit. We also leverage on said data to create what we call “GScore.” This score is a trust score that allows us to offer credit services to users to optimize their payment experience. This is a great help for many Filipinos as credit card penetration is still below 5 percent in the country. —CONTRIBUTED