Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 7)

SM: How do you view the competitive landscape both internationally and in India? SS: Quite honestly, I have not worried about the competitive landscape. Our opportunity is so large that I have to focus on the massive growth we have. The Indian market is so big that we have not looked at expanding beyond India.

Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 6)

SM: Where are you seeing traction in terms of income level? SS: It is unbelievable how wide our customer base is. We were sitting in a meeting with one customer who said it was a high-end niche product, and that they would be happy to roll it out but expected it would remain a niche

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Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 5)

SM: Are other telecom operators adopting this model? What is the business model of your relationship with the telecoms? SS: mChek’s vision is to be a global consumer payments brand. The business model is inherently transaction-based, where we receive a percentage of the transaction. Over a period of time other telecom operators will be launching the product,

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Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 4)

SM: When you joined, was it a commercially viable solution? SS: There was a big gap between the concept and a commercially ready solution. We had investments and a team and had to take the idea and build it into a large-scale enterprise system. That took 18 months.

Building Indian Mobile Banking: mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy (Part 3)

SM: When did you finally move back to India, and when did you decide to do mChek full time? SS: We moved back in 2003. Initially, I came to the conclusion that the business was not viable at that point, largely due to Indian regulatory issues. I ended up starting up the Indian operations for Ketera

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Forbes Column 08: Mobile Microfinance

My new Forbes column, Mobile Microfinance discusses how startups are trying to use the cell phone to bring banking to the under-banked.