Blog
I might be small but I’m your newest customer!
June 10, 2014 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC
For me, June is dominated by the huge big-tent marketing event, 2014 HP Discover, that HP holds in Las Vegas. I am on my way — more than likely participating — by the time you read this post.
I have to admit I really look forward to these events, as they’re the place to hear what is proving successful for HP and its partners. When it comes to the NonStop community, this might not be their premier event, but among the 10,000 attendees there’s more than enough representation, as there are many recognizable badges on folks tied to payments.
So much of what is transacted across the world’s tightly integrated networks involves NonStop. Just recently I was given a copy of the latest PayX report on acquiring and switching vendors and a quick check of the index highlights that there are only a few products available today that don’t include versions for NonStop.
This comparison report is a pretty weighty tome with some 15 vendors covered and I hope to be able to provide further insight a little later this month. However, what stands out immediately is just how many of these 15 vendors I interact with on a regular basis and how they are all embracing technologies I am particularly interested in — mobility, big data and the cloud.
One such vendor (that I often reference) is OmniPayments Inc., and it was just a short time ago that I caught up with its CEO, Yash Kapadia. What Yash was most excited about was a new deal just completed in Colombia that involved micro payments. The majority of businesses there are either small or micro and, according to one published report, the country has seen micro credit growing at 15 percent per year.
As for the connections between micro payments, ATMs and payments processing, Yash pointed out to me that, “bringing in a new population of users will only see the usage of channels such as ATMs and online banking grow. After all, those granted a microloan need to access their money somehow.”
Traditional payments platforms simply cost too much to be an effective tool for loan programs such as we are now seeing in Colombia, and while ATMs might have been visible throughout the country, they were essentially off limits to the microbusiness community.
Yash successfully implemented a project by the Colombian government that, as he told me earlier, “put into place a social safety net for poor mothers who have difficulty feeding, educating and maintaining health care for their children.”
This I covered in my last post, but I wasn’t aware at the time that this second project support — involving micro loans and also an arm of the Colombian government, had been won by Yash. Furthermore, OmniPayments was successful because it did capitalize on the technologies I’m interested in and tracking.
“We won the deal because of price, our provision of a solution as a service, and our choice of a cloud underpinning the service,” Yash told me.
Clearly, supporting micropayments necessitates having a cost-effective solution in place. Paying a premium for a product only to see it reduce the amount of money making its way into the hands of those operating the micro business is an important issue. And in the past, support of micropayments has been stymied by the costs involved.
“There are a lot of rules when it comes to spending the monies received from a microloan such as we are seeing in Colombia,” said Yash.
And that makes sense — there’s no point in making funds available if they’ll be spent at the local bar. “The government may own the program, but it’s the banks that lend you the money and they understand the need for rules governing how the money is used,” Yash told me.
So it is that even as you have to be extremely cost conscious, there’s also the need for powerful processing going on behind the scene.
“Why we could provide a lower price was in part because we are providing a service, but more importantly, we are providing that service from out of a cloud we have developed and support here in the U.S.,” Yash said. “It may surprise many to know that within our cloud we have deployed HP NonStop servers. In so doing, this has eliminated any pricing issues to do with using NonStop even as it has taken care of the possible ‘What is NonStop?’ questions that so often arise.”
To the best of my knowledge and from the dealings I have had with vendors providing payments solutions, the use of a NonStop system within a cloud to support financial transactions — including cash dispensing at ATMs — is an industry first for OmniPayments. The fact that they succeeded with such an approach will surely generate interest among other vendors who see opportunities to meet the needs of small businesses that depend upon micro loans.
Any time I see a new application coming to market that, while meeting a true business need also draws more users to the ATM network, it gets my undivided attention.
When it does all of this from a cloud environment that uses NonStop, it’s particularly newsworthy.
Not everything runs on NonStop, as the dashboards and monitoring are supported from Linux servers (also inside the cloud). But just putting this solution together, making it all work reliably and then positioning it to win new business is a rather remarkable achievement for OmniPayments.
I am sure I will hear a lot more about NonStop and about cloud computing — including a lot of discussion about hybrid computing — from HP during 2014 HP Discover. Knowing that someone is actually tying together all the pieces and making money in the process is not only newsworthy but also indicative of where I think payments in general are headed.
Even if HP isn’t up to speed on what is being done in Colombia with micro payments, I’m sure I will be given more than ample opportunity to fill in the blanks — as the founder of Tandem Computers, Jimmy Treybig, was so often heard to say, “It’s exciting!”
About Richard Buckle
Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a long association with the Information Technology (IT) industry as a user, vendor, and more recently, as an industry commentator, thought leader, columnist and blogger. Richard participates in the HPE VIP Community where he is part of their influencer team.
