Meet the Entrepreneurs
eSewa November 2013
Mobile Innovation
esewa
CONTACT INFORMATION
Facilitating e-commerce and online payments: having your wallet connected to the web through your mobile phone
Kathmandu, Nepal +977 1 4442435
himal@f1soft.com
www.esewa.com.np /esewa
Himal Niraula, Founder, Nepal
CHALLENGE Although e-commerce has existed for several years in Nepal, the market has not reached its full potential and is underdeveloped. This is largely due to the low internet penetration rate: only 11% of Nepal’s population had access to the internet in 2012. Additionally, many Nepalese neither have sufficient knowledge about making online payments and purchases, nor do they have access to the most basic of banking services, such as a simple bank account. For these reasons, most Nepalese are unable to carry out payments or buy goods over the Internet. At the same time, mobile phone subscriptions have been growing steadily with a 10% annual growth rate in the last few years, reaching 53% of the population in 2012. These statistics point towards great untapped potential for mobile e-payment solutions.
“ONLINE PAYMENTS WERE NOT AN OPTION IN NEPAL.”
IDEA eSewa’s founder Himal Niraula is an experienced businessman and developer, and is behind eSewa’s parent company, F1 Software, a game and software development company. In 2009, he sensed there was an opportunity to develop e-commerce for mobile phones. Following his intuition, he conducted market research in different communication centers throughout Nepal to define the business strategy needed to bring online payments to the country. He realized that as few Nepalese had internet access, there was a need to design a mobile application that could be used on both feature and smartphones. Moreover, the application should be able to conduct online and offline payments as well as being user-friendly.
@eSewaNepal
BUSINESS MODEL eSewa offers a Digital Payment Portal facilitating transactions between individual consumers, banks and their customers, and remittance transfers. It allows users to pay their bills, send and receive money, transfer funds to 21 different banks, withdraw eSewa money (digital money that has been deposited in an eSewa account) at any ATM, subscribe to magazines and newspapers and participate in different types of e-commerce (online shopping, ticket purchases). eSewa serves merchants as well as consumers and can be recharged through mobile banking, internet banking, counter deposit from banks, and fund transfers from another user. The application was launched in Nepal in 2010 and in Bangladesh in 2012. Currently, Himal and his team are getting ready to launch eSewa in Cambodia and are conducting market research in Canada to prepare for its launch in the near future. eSewa’s revenue model is transaction-based: merchants are charged 3% of every transaction, which is then processed by eSewa (e.g. online shopping). Users are not charged any fee, except for when using interbank transactions. In this case, charges on bank transfers among eSewa users may range from USD0.10 to USD1.00. BANKS
iBANKS
mBANK
CARDS
“THE RESULTS OF OUR MARKET RESEARCH MOTIVATED US TO ESTABLISH eSewa AS THE ‘FIRST ONLINE PAYMENT GATEWAY OF NEPAL’.”
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