Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Update on Eko - success will breed success

I wrote a blog on Eko about eighteen months ago. Eko is a start-up in India focussing on bringing financial services to the poor by making use of mobile technology. The management team did a lot of good work on the operational models and have learned a lot about the specifics of India. In my blog I emphasized that Eko is doing three things well: running the operations at a very low cost point, getting the economics of the agents right and having a passion to genuinely assist the communities that they serve.

This seems to be paying off now. It has been reported in the media that Eko now have more than two thousand agents activated, that almost a million subscribers have now been registered and that close to $300 million of value were transacted in the past year. Transaction volumes are growing at close to 50% year on year. (Read here). (While these numbers are impressive, they are still very low from an Indian perspective.) In addition, Eko was one of only six Indian projects recognised in the annual prestigious Tech Awards by the Tech Museum of San Jose. (Read here)

I am sure that their success and recognition will breed more success, and I would like to congratulate them.

1 comment:

Sanjay Swamy said...

Hannes
I echo your comments.

The team at EKO has gone beyond being a Business Correspondent or a Technology Platform provider - they have fought all challenges of banking business model uncertainty/changes as well as telecom partner challenges and truly worked hard to come up with a scalable model that caters to what the ecosystem has and wants.

I applaud their efforts!