WING Pilots (sign-up agents) selling starter kits at an activation event at a university in Phnom Penh.

Brad Jones is Managing Director of WING Cambodia. WING is a business that has been established by ANZ, one of the top 40 global banks, to create a mobile payments capability in an emerging market. WING was launched on 21 January 2009 by ANZ Chief Executive Officer, Mike Smith, and the Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Cambodia, Her Excellency Neav Chanthana. This followed a two month pilot period, where a small number of customers completed transactional activity and WING tested systems and business processes.

Since the launch, WING has been actively increasing its customer base through a mix of marketing and sales activities. WING currently has more than 150 points of representation in Cambodia, and is represented in 16 of the nation’s 24 provinces. WING uses the USSD channel to serve customers and is currently in partnership with one mobile operator, with more to follow shortly.

Tell us a bit about your business and who you’re trying to serve.
The WING customer base is primarily the under and un-banked of Cambodia. There are however a variety of segments within this large group. WING has focused on providing a service to garment workers, and other rural-originated customers who have traveled to Phnom Penh and other urban centers for work. The WING product provides them with a safe, affordable and fast way to transfer money to their relatives who rely on this remittance flow for education, housing and other staples. In urban centers, we have focused on the large student population, as the convenience of person-to-person transfer and airtime top-up makes WING an attractive product for them. We aim to expand our services to rural communities to help educate the families of urban-based workers about the convenience for them and their families of using WING rather than informal and less secure methods of money transfer.

What do your clients need and how are you trying to reach them in a way that is new or innovative?
Cambodia is a country that has faced many challenges, both historically and today. Approximately 80% of the Cambodian population are in rural areas, and 35% live beneath the World Bank poverty line. Whilst mobile telephony has thrived in Cambodia, there are still only approximately three million phone users in a country of 14 million people. The number of bank accounts is even less, with an estimate of 500,000 accounts in the country. Unlike other countries, there is no widespread electronic banking network, and there are only about 200 ATMs in the entire country. Cambodia has only had ATMs since 2005, and ANZ was the first bank to introduce them. These challenges have meant that we have had to design the business model in different ways, both learning from other global experiences and also by using our own analysis and initiative. We realized early in our development that it would be difficult to assume that every customer has a mobile phone, so we have designed the product in such a way that it can be used on village or shared phones in a secure manner. Whilst we offer an ATM card with our urban product, we realized we needed to build an extensive network of merchants, particularly in rural areas. In the absence of national retail networks such as post offices or convenience stores, we decided to partner with micro-finance institutions to provide our cash-in and cash-out network. We have been delighted to work with Vision Fund Cambodia who have co-branded branches in rural areas as WING Cash X-press points. To provide a solution for employee payrolls, we have also developed a mechanism for employers to pay their employees into WING accounts via a web interface.

Describe some of the challenges your organization has had to face.
There have been a number of challenges in implementing a mobile payments business in Cambodia. As a relatively small market for handset manufacturers, there are very few handsets that have Khmer unicode capability. This has meant that we have had to design support materials for customers to aid those with low English literacy to use the product. Like many other markets, there is also an absence of regulations for mobile payments in Cambodia. We have been fortunate to work with a progressive regulator in the National Bank of Cambodia, which participated in workshops on risk management, technology and the business model before they provided authorization for us to proceed.  We continue to have a close working relationship with the National Bank, including sharing the outcomes of our pilot program so that they are able to monitor the development of the payments system.

How is the current economic climate affecting your clients and your business?
Like the rest of the world, Cambodia is seeing the flow-on effects of the global financial crisis. Whilst we are in an early stage of development and growth, we are not noticing a huge impact on our business However, there have been job losses in the garment sector  over recent months, and other factories are working to shortened orders whilst they wait for consumer demand in the US and Europe to re-emerge. We are still working closely with the garment sector, including providing payroll services, however we have also started business development activity in other sectors, for example, the non-profit sector, to win payroll business. In addition, we continue to work with the urban under and un-banked sectors.  Establishing WING during this period means that we will be well-placed to continue to grow our business as the business environment picks up.

What is the outlook going forward? Are you optimistic or not? Why?
We are very optimistic about the transformational effect a mobile payments service such as WING can have on a country like Cambodia. We already hear anecdotal evidence of the benefits of the product from different customers, be it the tuk tuk driver who cashes in his takings from the previous day each morning, or the garment worker who now sends money without having to travel home on a monthly basis. It is also fantastic when I speak to our commission based agents, which we call WING Pilots, and hear their stories. A female university student was telling me last week that the income she now earns through selling WING accounts has meant that her parents are no longer paying her university tuition, which has given her a fantastic sense of achievement and empowerment. Like any new technology, it will take time for us to build scale and educate customers on the benefits of the service, however we are seeing very positive signs at this early stage of our development.