How RuPay Can Disrupt Visa And MasterCard

In Don’t Go Global Without Cracking The Value Proposition For Foreign Markets, I’d unpacked the dangers of taking your product global before cracking its value proposition for foreign markets. I’d taken the example of UPI in that post. Now, I’ll take RuPay, another product from UPI-owner NPCI. For the uninitiated, RuPay is a homegrown payment card … Read more

Don’t Go Global Without Cracking The Value Proposition For Foreign Markets

We regularly come across founders of software companies who have achieved a certain degree of success in India and now wish to take their product global. This is a perfectly sensible strategy because overseas markets are extremely lucrative. But many of these “export initiatives” flounder. Because what works here does not work there. UPI is … Read more

How Brands Can Leverage The Eternal Disconnect Between Want & Like

In Want v. Like: Decoding The Eternal Disconnect In Consumer Behavior, we saw a couple of examples of  the eternal disconnect between what consumers say they want and what they actually like. We also speculated on the root cause of this conflict.  In this follow on post, we’ll examine the implications of the want-versus-like disconnect … Read more

Want v. Like: Decoding The Eternal Disconnect In Consumer Behavior

Consumers tell you in surveys and focus group studies what features they want in your product. You build a product with those features. Consumers don’t like them. Your product bombs. In consumer behavior, there’s often a disconnect between what consumers say they want and what they actually like. In Why Do People Obsess Over Security … Read more

All Payments Are Not Equal – Retail Payments Primer

This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: I had a similar experience recently. I scanned the Merchant’s QR code at a restaurant with my PayTM app. PayTM asked me to link my bank account to complete the payment via UPI. I refused to do so because I wanted … Read more

Is Scalability A Bogey Created By Hardware Industry?

A friend recently asked me the following question via Twitter: @s_ketharaman Thoughts? I am not so sure since infra is still not scaling. https://t.co/vDi1zHZynB — Gopinath Pandalai (@gopibella) April 28, 2020 I read the linked HBR article on Blockchain technologies and replied as follows: Many mobile payments use cases I never thought could go digital … Read more

Remote Working Funny Incident

According to The Register article entitled New York Attorney General probes Charter over claims it forced staff to work in offices amid coronavirus pandemic, US telco Charter Communications is facing an investigation … over allegations … that it forced employees in New York to go into their offices for work, rather than (letting) them … … Read more

Don’t Ascribe To Generation What Can Be Explained By Age

Most statements about behavior of Millennials are true for all people when they were 25 years old, regardless of whether they really belong to the generation called Millennials (defined as born between 1995-2005) or some other generation like Gen X, Boomers or Gen Z. Let’s take one oft-quoted behavior: Millennials prefer renting to owning houses. … Read more