MannyPay - Manny Open Questions

Competition is good, and any open and interoperable payment system should make it easy for new players, small and big, to join. In this spirit, I am happy that another e-wallet has entered the market: MannyPay.

To satisfy my curiosity, I downloaded the app on my iPhone and tried to enroll. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get past a nonsensical error message, and the app froze on the screen where you are supposed to enter a passcode from a text message (which also never arrived).

Nevertheless, I have some initial comments, and I will update this post when they have fixed their teething issues.

As usual, the communication (1) is all over the place (euphemism for “it sucks”). I can only assume that the lack of clarity in their marketing is rooted in a lack of understanding of what they want to be. The motto is “Throw as many payment related buzz words at the my home page and see which sticks, i.e. makes money.”

First question is, whether they want to play on the sending or on the receiving side of a payment transaction. Of course they could do both, but who is the main target audience for their product launch? Take this statement on their website, for example: “MannyPay supports online banking for all major banks in the Philippines.” Does that mean they support transferring money into the MannyPay wallet from bank accounts, or does it mean they support accepting payments through bank transfer (“InstaPay”)?

Given that QRPh and InstaPay open up a large number of merchants to newcomers on the sending side, it would make sense to get customers to sign up their e-wallet as the merchant side is mostly taken care of. But then it is much harder to create a unique sales proposition that would differentiate them enough from other e-wallets.

The emphasis on lower transaction fees, could entice customers to use their e-wallet, if the customer is indeed the one who ends up paying the fee. Or it could convince merchants to make the switch, hoping that using “MannyPay” would reduce the cost of payment.

I read (2) that MannyPay will target B2B payments. In my last job I had to use the B2B payment platforms of a couple of banks. It should be very easy to improve on the user experience and the cost of these services.