Thanks for the outpouring of support to me, on the publishing of my first book, The Digital Money Game, now available on Amazon sites around the world. After I last shared about it, A number of you asked me what made me want to write this book, so I’d like to say a bit about this today.
When I strayed into the world of payments, after being in Telecoms for many years, it opened my eyes to so many new possibilities. This was around 2005 and it seemed to be a no-brainer for a telecoms operator to build new revenue streams from payments.
This proved elusive though. Firstly it was a personal challenge to try to understand so many new areas all at once, and then be able to position the business case to top management in a way that communicated both opportunities and risks. All of us had spent our lives in Telecoms, IT and non-Payments functions, and we had to rapidly understand Payments, E-Money, Regulations, Prepaid, Cash Networks and all this across multiple geographies.
Regulations did not help. At the time I blamed myself, thinking there was something more I could do. Ten years later, having worked with a world leading bank and the largest money transfer operator in the world, I got to understand regulations so much better. Now I KNOW there was little else I could do: One depends on regulators, who themselves have such a difficult time coping with the large number of changes, with a heavy burden of responsibility on their shoulders.
The truth is, this is all new. We are all learning. But that doesn’t take away the stress of not knowing, as so many of you across the world would agree! I wish I had had someone to tell me what was happening, how it would affect me and what I needed to know to stay ahead. I wanted practical cases I could learn from, and reassurance that this was an exciting space to build a new career.
This is my chance to make that wish a reality for others, by sharing the lessons I learnt and offering some tips from over 10 years I have spent launching services of the different kinds discussed in this book. I hope it will help you in some small way, to reinforce decisions you have to make, to help you to put your case forward to management and most of all to feel good about yourself and what you are achieving in this highly competitive and changing space.
I would love to hear your feedback. Did this book help you? What further questions did it raise?
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