Sanjay Swamy, CEO of mChek (Mobile payments and security company) shares his view on startup companies and his journey as an entrepreneur. The company has grown to great heights in short span of its arrival in the market. It presented its product '2 factor authentication using mobile' in September 2006 and within 6 months of time it has been nominated as the finalist for the Global Peer Awards to be held in 3GSM Barcelona.
Prior to mChek, Sanjay was General Manager of Ketera India, a wholly owned subsidiary of Kleiner Venture backed Ketera Inc. Sanjay also setup and ran India operations for mPortal, a Virginia-based startup in the Wireless Data services arena. He has also worked in the online/mobile content at Portal Software, Xerox PARC and in embedded systems at Wind River for 12 years. Check their website
http://www.mchek.com to know all about their services
All about mChek What are the key technologies that are used in mChek? mChek as a company is focused on security and payment in the mobile phone. It enables the user to use the phone as a secure payment device. It manages all the credit card, debit card or any payment instrument. This means you can leave wallet at your home as long as you have your phone. You have lot of security around it, the data cannot be hampered or stolen. It is secured in such a way that even though your mobile is lost nobody will be able to use your account.
Is this like a 'Paypal' mobile for India? Yes and no. Classical paypal is one where you deposit money into your paypal account and use it for payments. mChek enables the payments through banking channel.
What is the estimated market in India? Oh! It's a huge market as every transaction can be done through mChek. Ever individual family has to pay many common bills every month. They even have to pay for any goods that they purchase in the market, whether it is physical merchants, Internet merchants, shopping mall or call centers. We support all of these scenarios. We are focusing across the board on all type of merchants in the beginning. However the updates will be higher in certain areas and lower in others.
What role does Rajesh Jain (launched India World in 1995) play in your company? Rajesh is a very strong advisor. Rajesh Jain is one of the Board of Directors and also investor of the company. He gives a lot of advice, recommendations and direction on how we focus. Sometimes in the business you have tremendous opportunity. At that time you have to make sure you are focusing on the basics in a systematic way. These are the areas where you need people like him for all the help.
Do you foresee a drastic shift of online payment to M payment? I hope so... to mChek as it is completely secure and convenient.
Credit card Companies are complaining about the low penetration of Plastic money. In such a scenario do you think mobile payment will be successful? This is the one device which most of the Indians like the daily labourers or auto drivers have. The number of merchants who can afford mobile phone is very high whereas the number of merchants who can afford fulltime soft channel is very less. By turning the phone into soft channel we automatically have exploded the capability of merchants to accept the electronic payment.
Our whole business model is around, the fact that 'can we save one trip to ATM machines'. Everybody will be benefited. You don't have to dispense that much cash in the ATM machine or have that many ATM machines. That is a substantial market.
By using mChek you are saving that extra time and energy that you spend on the large queue for paying any bill or withdrawing any cash from the ATM. We will be successful. It will take some time it's not going to happen overnight. We are going to move towards our goal, it's just the matter of time.
An Investor's comment on the present hot areas of businesses in this new economy system and why do you think they are hot. I don't know what areas are hot...(thinks). I invested in Picsquare, because I loved that ardor that young people had. So whatever areas I am passionate about they are hot. Anything that has substance and value is hot for me.
Read all about Sanjay Swamy as an entrepreneur of mChek in the next page. Tags: a chat with sanjay swamy ceo of mchek.
