‘Beam’ing payments — 7 days a week
Speaking to Shezan Amiji is a crash-course in enthusiasm, passion, team-work and business. He’s the intrepid UAE-based entrepreneur who has the distinction of a 100 per cent success rate with both the ventures he’s started up. Both of these are in industries that have deeply-entrenched business models and processes.
Amiji was raised in the UAE in an entrepreneurial family. His academic credentials are from the best of the best — Dubai College, Oxford and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been very clear from the start that his future lay in the UAE, with his family. He returned from his education to be with his parents. An only child, it was soon apparent to Amiji, that like his father, he wanted to plough his own furrow. Rather than focus on the family business, Amiji ventured out to start up something entirely on his own.
He first started up 7 Days, the free tabloid newspaper. After successfully exiting this venture, he went on to start up Beam Wallet, a popular mobile payment application, at a time when ‘Fintech’ was an unknown word.
After a successful run in the UAE, Beam Wallet is now in Sweden. Amiji is tapping into a global opportunity, which according to Allied Market Research’s January 2017 report titled Mobile Payments Market, is set to grow to $3,388 million in 2022 with a CAGR of 33.4 per cent starting from 2016.
The Beam Wallet is more of a consumer experience than a payments app. The experience includes loyalty, payments and real-time access to historical spend information. The very humorous Beam Wallet commercials gently poke fun at the way we carry multiple cards, physical wallets and cash.
The ads reflect Amiji’s focus on disrupting the status quo. In his experience, disrupting entire ecosystems truly unlocks value. Amiji extends this thought even further. Entrepreneurs must disrupt because they do not have the margins that incumbents have. The Beam Wallet does just that. It takes away the clumsiness of consumer and merchant interactions by creating a digital pipe between the two. It does so within the existing four-party model plumbing.
This virtual pipe allows merchants to seamlessly transfer value to their customers’ mobile apps. Consumers can redeem this value via the same virtual pipe. The Beam Wallet treats card accounts similarly, allowing consumers to use the same pipe to make payments effortlessly, while at the same time allowing them to redeem value. Just one simple effortless transaction. And consumers as well as merchants get realtime access to rich information on spend. For the card issuing banks, the Beam Wallet proposition proactively helps them retain, acquire and re-activate customers.
Comparisons with ApplePay and SamsungPay are natural. However the distinction is that Beam is phone-agnostic and loyalty is in-built into the new ecosystem. The former two on the other hand, are only extensions of the existing card eco- system. Another advantage is that card companies have built generic wallet capabilities that allow transactions made with the apps such as the Beam Wallet quite safe and secure. One more important difference is that by getting the fundamental value proposition right, Beam Wallet is able to flexibly adapt to new interfaces without impacting the consumer experiences. Most incumbents are locked in to one interface or another — cards, NFC, QR codes or SMS.
Speaking about his experience as an entrepreneur, Amiji talks about a few fundamentals. He knows that the entrepreneurship journey is a lonely one. That is why working with a trusted and passionate team is one key fundamental. He speaks about his complete trust in the late Tony Metcalf, editor of 7 Days from 2004 to 2008. Working with Metcalf, Amiji took 7 Days to unprecedented heights. Amiji speaks about Nadim Khoury and Serdar Nurmammedov, the team that founded Beam Wallet, in the same vein. Passionate and professional people to work with.
One more key success factor for entrepreneurship is the ability to envision an endpoint and to never stop selling that vision. Amiji relates this back to incumbency and the need to make the extraordinary effort to convince people and institutions about the value of the disruption. To do this requires a huge amount of energy and conviction. This is why entrepreneurs must be prepared to remain highly motivated and charged up throughout their startup journey.
Amiji knows very well that more than 99 per cent of entrepreneurs struggle to make huge profits out of their initiatives. There are very few unicorns. But this is not a reason to not make every effort to succeed. He describes Tom Siebel, the founder of Siebel Systems. Apparently Siebel had 15 detailed contingency plans including one for a massive terrorist attack. It is said that in the aftermath of the gut-wrenching ‘911’ incident, Siebel operated to the plan. Entrepreneurship is much less about reactiveness and turning on a dime. It is much more about diligent work and detailed planning including worst case scenarios.
The discussion ended with Amiji rushing home for his son’s birthday. Ultimately, what matters most to him is his family.
HI-TRAC: The author’s shorthand for Happiness Index, Infrastructure, Talent, Regulations, Access and Capital. The six pillars that make UAE a great place for a startup. This week, the focus is on talent.