What Does The Value Added Payment Stack in Remittances Look Like?

When it comes to payments, many people do not know what the value-added stack looks like. The value-added payment stack for mobile money and remittances is nearly more or less the same. I wrote an article called “Architecting a mobile wallet that customers want.” If you scroll down, the first image you see is an example of what a vertical value-added payments stack looks like. This short video explains why you need to consider the value-added payments stack if you plan to go into the remittance business.

Transcript:

Hello my name is Faisal Khan and I am a banking and a payment consultant and today I want to talk about the vertical stack of payments. Whenever you want to or rather when people want to enter the world of payments they do so with remittances. Why? Because they say remittance is the low hanging fruit. Why is it the low hanging fruit, people ask.

Well, peer to peer transfers is the simplest form of exchange that is known to man for hundreds of years. Making a payment for me to someone else or someone else paying me is the most basic form of how currency exchange takes place. But then in the vertical stack we can go up the vertical stack and have more services and product offerings that otherwise are not available horizontally. Sure you can scale horizontally as well but you should also look at scaling vertically.

What does that mean to scale vertically? Well, so after the basic P2P there are things like mobile top-ups. So, in the remittance space, a value added service that you would offer after the basic remittance is mobile top-up. So you can pay the mobile top up or the air time of your parents, of your sister, your brother, your son, your mother etc. After mobile top ups we can go towards bill payments, so you could pay the electricity bill, utility bills, gas bills, cable, internet, telephone etc. Even more up the vertical, you know, ladder you can go and do payments like rent. You can do school fees, you can do insurance payments, car payments, even higher mortgages, even higher any good investments and savings, you could buy municipality bonds you could do savings, you can buy six months bonds, you can do lending circles, even higher you can do succession planning, you can do college finds, you can do retirement funds etc. All those take advantage of the basic payments that you are making a payment. Remittances is very low and as you go higher you have more value added services. So when you are designing a remittance product it is very very important that you consider what some other value added services are and that you can incorporate in your product design.

I hope I was able to shed some light on this very important subject. If you have any questions or comments feel free to ask below. I will also link to an article, it’s called “Architecting a mobile wallet” and the diagram of what I have explained as a vertical value added services is included in that article should you want to see it. Till next time, have a good one. Take care.

This page was last updated on September 1, 2022.