MoneyOnMobile, Inc., one of India’s largest phone-based mobile payment networks, announced the launch of the Reserve Bank of India’s payment service [Bharat Bill Payment] through the MoneyOnMobile retailer platform. The launch of this new service enables its retailers to meet the growing demand for digital payment services among the estimated 600-800 million unbanked/under-banked population of India, and increase the monthly spend of their existing customers. The eighty additional services cover a wide range of billers from electric, water, and gas utilities, to mobile bills and television recharge.
We are excited about the launch of the Bharat Bill Payment service on our retailer portal. We believe it will help MoneyOnMobile continue to transform the cash experience for retailers and their customers. With such a large number of services being added, consumers can convert their cash into digital payments to access more of the vital, everyday services that make their lives easier.
Will Dawson, Chief Operating Officer, MoneyOnMobile, said
Our goal is to help retailers deepen their engagement with the community they serve. By enabling new services being demanded by their customers, retailers are able to meet the growing demand, and be the ‘one-stop shop’ people can visit for access to financial services. This helps the company grow our retailer base, grow the share of consumer wallet, and increase retailer retention.
About MoneyOnMobile, Inc.
MoneyOnMobile, Inc. is an India focused mobile payments technology and processing company offering mobile payment services. MoneyOnMobile enables Indian consumers to use mobile phones to pay for goods and services or transfer funds from one cell phone to another. It can be used as simple SMS text functionality or through the MoneyOnMobile application or internet site. MoneyOnMobile has more than 350,000 retail locations throughout India.
About Bharat Bill Pay
The Bharat bill payment system is a RBI conceptualized system driven by NPCI. It is a one-stop ecosystem for payment of all bills providing an interoperable and accessible ‘Anytime Anywhere’ bill payment service to all customers across India with certainty, reliability and safety of transactions.
Bharat Bill Payment has multiple modes of payment and provides instant confirmation of payment via an SMS or receipt. It offers myriad bill collection categories like electricity, telecom, DTH, gas, water bills etc. through a single window.
Social media now plays a key role in advertising for many businesses. If a company is not using social media, they could be missing out on opportunities to raise brand awareness and acquire new customers.
For many companies, Facebook is the focus of their social media advertising strategy. It has the largest user base and the broadest reach in terms of different demographic groups. Even with this information, many businesses still wonder whether Facebook advertising can have an impact.
Facebook advertising does have the potential to help brands increase awareness and influence purchasing behaviors. Research has even shown that Facebook ads can affect brand image and have an impact on purchasing intent.
Knowing that Facebook advertising can help your business reach its goals is good, but there is more to successful Facebook advertising than simply creating and publishing ads. Working with and learning from a successful Facebook advertising firm will help you understand what goes into developing an effective ad campaign. Additionally, you can keep these basics of Facebook marketing in mind.
Define Your Goals
Setting a clear goal is one of the most important parts of running a successful Facebook advertising campaign. Without a goal, you will simply publish ads that have no aim. While some of them might have good results, the campaigns will never live up to the platform’s full potential.
Page Likes
You can run campaigns that specifically work to get more likes on your Facebook page. This can be a good place for businesses to start because it will grow the organic reach of their Facebook page and can also raise brand awareness. Additionally, these ads have great potential because they do not ask much of the user.
Website Traffic
Website traffic ads can also work well as a launch point for companies that are new to Facebook. It’s a relatively low-pressure advertising approach, and you can direct the ads to any page on your website. Instead of moving right to pushing for a sale, you are just letting consumers know you are there and showing them what your business has to offer.
Website Conversions
Most Facebook ad campaigns are going to result in conversions of some sort. However, this will happen organically after initial contact with the ad. When you develop a campaign focused on driving conversions, you are targeting consumers and directing them to assets that are designed to move them closer to a conversion.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness campaigns are about exposing more people to your company. By letting people know more about you and what you can do for them, you are essentially setting yourself up to have greater success with the ads that are designed to drive conversions. Instead of selling, you are demonstrating the value of your brand and letting consumers know why they should engage with your services.
Lead Generation
With lead generation ads, you are trying to get consumers to share their contact details. With Facebook, this strategy can be more successful than through some other advertising platforms. Instead of directing the user to a landing page where they fill out a form, all of the information can be collected through the social media platform.
Customer Acquisition
Acquiring new customers is an obvious goal for Facebook advertising. You can use Facebook ads to get people to sign up for a service, buy products, install apps, and more. Facebook makes it easy to find new customers, and you have a variety of advertising options that can encourage them to become a client.
Offers
Offers can be a great way to attract new customers and to re-engage old customers. In some cases, you might be providing something for free to get people to sign up for a list. In others, it could be a discount to encourage a purchase. Offers work because they help your ads stand out from all of the other content that is shared on Facebook.
Engagement
Engagement ads can work well for users that have already had some level of contact with your brand. You could run these ads to showcase new products or features. They can also be helpful to encourage use of an app, or you could use an offer to get visitors back to your website. The idea is to remind a past customer of your business and make an effort to re-engage them.
Reaching Your Goals
Having a goal is important because it helps to inform the other decisions you will make concerning the direction of the ad campaign. Once you have a goal, you then need to use some best practices to help you to reach it.
Audience Targeting
Much of the power of Facebook advertising comes from the ability to target the right audience. Facebook collects a lot of information about its users, which allows advertisers to select different audience attributes. These can then be accurately targeted for ads. In addition to that, you can also have great success with features like custom audiences and lookalike audiences.
Social Proof
If users see other people benefiting from something, they are more likely to want to follow suit and do it as well. Social proof can be a powerful tool when it comes to Facebook advertising, and it can add a small push that gets users to engage with your ads. As an example, if you are trying to get people to sign up for your email list, you could show that you already have thousands of active subscribers.
Address Pain Points
Promoting the value of your brand is important, but there is something to be said for addressing the concerns of the consumer. What problems does your product solve? What need does it fulfill? If you’re able to address these concerns in your ad, you can make an emotional connection with the consumer. This will increase the chances that they will engage.
Test Your Ads
Research can help you to find good strategies to start with, but nothing will guide you to success like your own experience. If you want to be able to learn from your campaigns and find the strategies that offer the best results, you need to A/B test your ads.
Retarget
You will find that some people go to your website without converting. This is a sign that they have some interest, but for whatever reason, were unwilling to follow through and convert. Instead of giving up on these missed opportunities, you could create a custom audience of website visitors and retarget them with new ads. You may even want to consider offering some type of incentive that will help move them closer to a conversion.
Businesses of all sizes can have success with Facebook advertising. You just need to find the right goals for you and deploy the right strategy to reach them. If you are still having trouble getting the most from your Facebook ad campaigns, you might want to consider working with a firm that specializes in social media advertising.
About the Author
Rae Steinbach is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing [of course]. More about Rae can be found here.
CASHe, India’s most preferred digital lending company for young salaried millennials, promoted by serial entrepreneur and private equity investor V. Raman Kumar, has entered into a strategic partnership with BankBazaar, India’s leading neutral online marketplace, to offer its short-term personal loans on its online financial platform. Under the partnership, users of Bankbazaar.com will now have easy access to instant short-term credit facility from CASHe through its multiple loan options ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 200,000 payable over 15, 30, 90 days and 180 days.
The fintech company currently processes over 27,000 loan applications in a month and has achieved an overall loan disbursal of Rs 400 crores with 1.8 million app downloads and over 1.5 Lakh active users since launch of operations in April 2016. The company is aiming to achieve an overall loan disbursal of Rs 900 crores by March 2019.
Speaking about the partnership, Chairman of Aeries Financial Technologies, V. Raman Kumar, said
We are excited to partner with BankBazaar.com in this strategic tie up as it allows CASHe to be on BankBazar platform where our potential customers are present and comparing various personal loans from other financial institutions. BankBazaar.com’s customers will now benefit from CASHe’s best-in-class differentiated product suite in the retail loan segment.
This partnership also will help us expand our customer base exponentially with this leading neutral online marketplace recording over 90 million visitors in the last quarter of 2018. BankBazaar has been at the forefront in redefining the buying experience when it comes to the purchase of financial services for the Indian consumers. We are confident that this partnership will create a win-win situation for those customers who until now were being dropped off by lending institutions due to inadequate credit rating scores. CASHe with its social behavior filtering algorithm will allow access to such customers to a wide array of instant short-term personal loans on its lending platform.
Commenting on the collaboration, Navin Chandani, Chief Business Development Officer, BankBazaar, said
At BankBazaar.com, our mission is to help our customers access the widest range of financial products on our platform. Partnering with a fintech company like CASHe is a step in this direction. With CASHe’s integration, we are now able to offer short-term personal loans to our customers who otherwise would not qualify for loans by financial institutions that typically offer medium- to long-term loan products. We are very positive about this tie up with an agile and digitally focussed player like CASHe as we see a huge demand for a loan product offering that is instant, hassle-free and convenient.
About CASHe
CASHe is India’s most preferred digital lending company for young salaried millennials. CASHe provides immediate short-term personal loans to young professionals based on their social profile, merit and earning potential using its proprietary algorithm based machine learning platform.
In April 2016, Aeries Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd, launched its innovative technology-driven lending platform for the young, urban millennials. CASHe provides almost instantaneous loans on-demand. Its user-friendly digital interface enables faster loan application process and quicker loan disbursal’s. CASHe provides hassle-free loans with its app enabled documentation and loan disbursal/repayment process. Powered by its industry-first algorithm driven credit scoring platform, Social Loan Quotient [SLQ], CASHe quickly determines a user’s credit worthiness by using multiple unique data points to arrive at a distinct credit profile of the customer. For more information, please visit CASHe
At what point do you really focus your resources on your customer ? Do you devote countless hours and investments on the point up until they place an order ? Or do you look at the process differently, and think about a customer’s contribution to your order and sold pipeline in a unique way?
One of the things you can do to reconsider how your business works and how you optimize your processes is to think about one of the crucial setups of your business as a whole – the order to cash process. Reconsidering that process and figuring out ways to use technology to streamline and maximize it can be a way to really push your business to the next level of success. But in order to get there, you have to make sure you understand what we’re talking about.
Order to cash basically is taking what happens at the moment a customer places an order, and understanding the activity and the data that happens at this point. Of course, there’s a nod to all the work that goes into the process before this order placement even happens – there is sales and marketing, among others. But this order to cash process looks at the point of the sale and then takes it beyond that. As you analyze all the points along the order to cash process, you then are able to really dig deep and figure out if there are things that are ‘sticking’ points along the way, or if there are efficiencies that you aren’t taking advantage of. And one of the key ways to improve all those processes, of course, is by using technology.
The order to cash process can be analyzed in terms of eight key steps, and what happens at those steps. Ready to learn more ? This graphic can help.
Arctic Fox has bought in a revolution in backpack industry by launching the colour changing bags, a phenomenon witnessed for the first time globally. After a year of rigorous research, the brand has come up with its range of bags ‘Chameil’- the next generation colour changing bags. These bags will surely add a lot of excitement in your daily routine and not to mention, making the bags and his owner a talk of the town. Designed with its heat-sensing technology fabric, this ultra-modern smart backpack starts changing to vibrant colour, the moment it is exposed to sun rays or for that matter to any source of heat.
Today every brand claims of launching high tech modern bags. So what makes Arctic Fox bags different ? Arctic Fox has launched bags with built-in USB port. Considering the high charging demand of today’s smart phones, a separate compartment for your power bank is made to make sure that you charge your phone hassle free, on the go. These colour changing bags are available in 4 different colors and can accommodate upto 15 inch laptops in its dedicated premium padded compartment. Chameil also comes with easy access pockets on the top and the sides, specifically designed for shades & accessories. So now carrying your backpack around with all your gadgets just got more convenient and cooler.
Considering that backpacks are supposed to be carried for longer duration, Arctic Fox design team has paid great attention to the user comfort with well-designed airflow system for comfortable back and Spandex padded shoulder straps for heavy-weight management that let you move around sleekly.
With additional rain cover, accessible pockets, roomy compartments, weather-resistant material, and the durable construction, the bag is a perfect for college students and is sure to capture the imagination of the vivid mind.
Arctic Fox Bags
Sridhar Thirunakara, Founder & CEO, Outshiny India [Parent Company of Arctic Fox], said
I’m very excited to introduce the brand Arctic Fox, primarily targeted at student segment and we have been working for more than a year on the product design with extensive research to understand the user behavior and their day to day problems faced with the present product available in the market. Our core belief is that with relentless optimism and creativity we could solve any problem and achieve our impossible dreams.
Arctic Fox backpacks are available online at Arctic Fox and at all major MBOs.
Housing.com, part of Elara Technologies Pte Ltd. which also owns PropTiger.com and Makaan.com, today announced the launch of first-of-its-kind ‘Housing Partner Assist‘ app to help the sellers manage listings, home seekers and much more with a single tap on their phones. This new intuitive app will enable sellers to list properties at their convenience and receive instant alerts on home seekers for the property and contact the buyers immediately with a single click on the mobile screen. Moreover, the expert filter options of the app will enable sellers focus on priority home seekers and close deals faster.
With the help of this new cutting-edge app, the sellers can list the properties in simple steps and click on the property to get a detailed view. Additionally, sellers can edit, add more details and photos of the promoted properties to improve the quality score and boost the rankings in the search results page. Using the app, the sellers can refer to the potential customer’s requirement summary to shortlist relevant properties before scheduling a meeting.
Commenting on the development, Ravi Bhushan, Group CPTO – Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com said
Within the real estate classifieds industry, Housing.com has always differentiated itself on the basis of superior product usability and consumer experience. With our new app ‘Housing Partner Assist’ app, sellers can avoid the conventional and cumbersome lead generation process and get off to a speedier start in this fiercely competitive industry. We are confident that the new app will create additional value for the sellers in improving business revenue and provide more control to build trust with buyers.
As the app will enable sellers to be more engaged, buyers will receive timely response from sellers and will be able to find the best-suited homes in a shorter period. For instance, the expert filter option of the app makes it possible to manage one’s property portfolio on a single screen and with its help one can navigate through the properties and find the right one for home seekers very quickly.
The app provides the option of real-time promotion of properties to sellers that can help them better manage day-to-day business activities with less investment of time to ensure improved productivity, better customer service and more satisfied clients.
Elara Technologies Pte Ltd is a Singapore-based technology services company and is the owner of Housing.com, PropTiger.com and Makaan.com. The company provides digital real estate marketing and transactions services. PropTiger.com and Housing.com merged in January 2017 to create India’s largest full service Online-to-Offline [O2O] real estate platform.
A very famous quote on investing says – ‘Risk & Rewards are two sides of the same coin’. This means that in most of the cases, higher the amount of risk involved chances of maximizing the returns are also very high! The investment portfolio of every person would differ since it is dependent on various factors like risk appetite, assets, liabilities, dependencies, etc. and hence, it becomes virtually impossible for any investment firm to cater to varied investment requirements of such a large audience.
This is where emerging technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can play a vital role in creating a tailor-made investment plan based on your long-term and short financial requirements. Machine Learning has already the paved way into the Fintech market, be it approving loans, documentation, managing assets, etc. Many Fintech startups are leveraging machine learning, AI, Chatbots and helping banking institutions to either enhance the existing banking experience or creating kick-ass products in the areas of wealth management, personal finance, customer service, etc.
When it comes to investing, there are different types of investors – Novice and seasoned investors. There are options for investing in FD, RD, Gold, etc. that are used for many years, are less risky and yield lesser returns. On the other hand, there are options like investing in stocks, equity markets, Gold bonds, etc that yield higher returns but the investor needs to have at least basic know-how about the markets. According to a report by Bloomberg, less than 1.5% of the Indian population invested in equity markets and only 2% of India’s household savings were exposed to equity.
Most of the investment firms reserved their advisory services for HNI’s, with none of them catering to the expanding retail investors and middle-income groups. This is where founders of Fintech startup WealthApp saw an opportunity and created WealthApp with a single aim to make goal-based investing easier by combining their wealth management expertise with the power of Machine Learning. In simple terms, WealthApp is an algorithm based, tech-driven investment platform created by seasoned finance professionals that help you create your ‘Perfect’ investment portfolio as per your requirements and risk appetite. We had earlier interviewed Gaurav Dhawan, Co-Founder of WealthApp and today we do a detailed review of the app w.r.t features, enhancements, competition, etc.
Note – Since it is an app related to finance, we have blurred out certain things that might be personal or related to my investment portfolio.
WealthApp: Changing the Investment Habit for ‘Better Financial Planning’
As mentioned earlier, investment in the equity markets is not very popular option amongst investors in India but that scene is changing rapidly! 60,000 new investors are investing in Mutual Funds and this is where fin-tech startups like WealthApp are acting as a change agent. WealthApp is using Machine Learning, AI and proprietary algorithms to invest, track, redeem, etc. in Mutual Funds owned by different AMC’s [Asset Management Company].
Apart from in-depth know-how about the Mutual Fund [MF] industry, another problem faced by investors is that in order to keep a track of their MF investment, they have to log on to the website of each AMC for checking the performance, invest in other MF’s from the same AMC, etc. WealthApp has tied-up with different AMC’s due to which investors can track their investments from AMC’s, invest in Mutual Funds from other popular AMC’s in a single window. As an investor, you have to create a profile on WealthApp, allow WealthApp to access your portfolio information from the corresponding AMC & you are done 🙂
With WealthApp, there is an end to the long winding process, paper work and emergence of proper guidance in investment methods by a team that has extensive experience in managing individual investment portfolios.
WealthApp: Goal-based investing, dedicated fund manager and more
Each one of us has short-term as well as long-term goals and ambitions like going for an overseas vacation, buying a house, overseas education, etc. and this is where ‘Goal-Based Investing’ plays a very crucial role. Goal-based investing aims to get around the drawback of the traditional investment approach, which generally focuses on outperforming the market while staying within the investor’s threshold for risk. Instead, it uses individual asset pools with an investment strategy that is tailored to the client’s specific goals [Source].
Goal-based investing: Once you create your profile on WealthApp, you would be recommended with relevant and personalized investment options based on your risk profile, goal & aspirations set by you. There is an automated and continuous monitoring, re-balancing of your portfolio according to changing market conditions so that you can maximize the returns on your investments!
Dedicated fund manager: Couple of months back when we interviewed Gaurav Dhawan, he raised a very valid point ‘Investors are interested to invest in Mutual Funds but most of them feel that MFs are difficult to understand’. This is where WealthApp wants to create a dent in order to drive investor’s interest in MFs. This is one of the primary reasons why every investor on WealthApp has a dedicated fund manager assigned to him/her. The fund manager would hand-hold you in the on-boarding process, efficiently managing your portfolio, guiding you to maximize returns and more…
Frictionless on-boarding process: The KYC is done in a paperless manner, you no longer to submit multiple paper documents for the on-boarding process 🙂 Since the platform runs on high-end machine learning algorithms, the entire advisory process is automated so that investors can get timely investment tips and latest updates on their investments.
Investment tips & Detailed reports: Once you have your account setup and records of your MF investments are imported on WealthApp, you start receiving personalized e-mailer based on your investment profile, goals and other important criteria that might impact your long-term & short-term investment goals!
Also if you want to make further investments, you need not go to the AMC’s website but can continue investing in MFs via WealthApp. At any point in time, you can download the performance reports of your investments.
The design of the app is very simple since there is a possibility that the app could be used by someone who is not well versed with mobile/technology but has good knowledge about MF’s, equity markets, etc.
WealthApp: Improvements, Competition…
WealthApp amalgamates technology [AI, Machine Learning] with finance/investing and makes lives of MF investors easy since now they no longer have to log-in to each & every AMC’s website where they have invested their funds! However, in many cases investing is a long-term strategy and hence, it becomes important that reports are very detailed. The reports should highlight the performance of any particular fund in a graphical representation so that that data dishes out much more information. As seen in the screenshot below, the reports of funds that an investor has invested in are not detailed and the overall format also needs some improvement.
There has been a meteoric rise in the fintech startup landscape in H1, H2 of 2017 with e-commerce, FinTech startups top Funding Charts in H1 2017 [Source]. Many of the fintech companies are leveraging Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Social Data Intelligence, Blockchain, etc. in order to solve critical business problems, including the one being solved by WealthApp. A fintech startup UpWardly is also leveraging Machine Learning to Upwardly, which facilitate goal-based investments in mutual funds.
WealthApp: Conclusion
Overall, WealthApp is a simple yet effective service from seasoned finance professionals that makes ‘goal-based investing’ easier. Even after you have downloaded the WealthApp application, there is still a human-touch to investing via your dedicated fund managers. Barring a few improvement areas, it is an app that a retail investor can use in order to test the waters of Mutual Fund Investing. If you are a seasoned investor, WealthApp solves the major hurdle of logging on-to individual AMC’s website for maintaining your investment portfolio.
You can download WealthApp for Android from here and WealthApp for iOS from here. If you are an existing user of WealthApp, do leave your feedback/experience in the comments section.
India’s youngest and fastest growing media brand, ScoopWhoop, has always stood up for the bold, free-spirited Indian woman, supporting her as she overcomes ‘log kyakahenge‘ and other societal drama, to reach her true potential. In keeping with that tradition, ScoopWhoop Shop’s new womens-wear collection is a well-deserved tribute to the ‘unsanskaari‘ Indian woman.
Our womens-wear collection has been specially crafted for the bold, beautiful, and daring women of today. It’s for those who are not afraid to make a noise for the right reasons.
This collection truly resonates with everything the badass woman of today stands for. Here’s to the fighter, the oddball, the unsanskaari one, who dares to break the rules and makes her own sanskaars rather than following ones she’s not okay with. ScoopWhoop’s Unsanskaari collection is up for grabs at ScoopWhoop’s online Shop
About ScoopWhoop Shop
Browse through a collection of vibrant, quirky products that have zero fucks to give. Just like you. Whether you’re a 90s kid, a feminist, an animal lover, a people hater or just a lazy bugger, you will find something tailored just for you at the ScoopWhoop Shop.
