Sunday, October 18, 2009

The Telenor EasyPaisa mobile banking launch

The launch of Telenor Pakistan EasyPaisa was arguebly the biggest launch of branchless banking in the world this year. With a brilliant marketing campaign consisting of social-media teasers, billboards, double-full page advertisements and a glamourous event, the service was announced last week Wednesday. I think everyone seeing the television advertisements would agree that the campaign was as good as it can be. (See here and here).

However, what makes this launch significant, is the fact that Telenor Pakistan subscriber base is close to thirty million in a country of 180 million people. The product was launched with 2 000 agents activated and supported. The service deployed is unique to the culture and needs of this vast country. During the launch the State Bank of Pakistan governor, Syed Salim Raza, publicly gave his support for the service and highlighted the big need for more affordable financial services, where only 12% of the population is served with formal financial services. Read more press here, here and here.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I dont know why the world is excited about this new service from Telenor, first of all why they are calling this easypaisa and if they are calling this so then why they have designed the whole campaign around bills payment.

Banks are providing this service since last 50 years, there are so many other institutions already doing this, then:

WHY TELENOR THINKS THIS IS A REVOLUTION!!!!!

Hannes@Home said...

Good point, but consider the following. They managed to activate two thousand merchants that now offer a service that banks do, at any time of the day, outside of bank branches. It would not be too difficult to increase this number significantly, and to extend the service to other banking offerings...