Year End Conference Call Today HI all: did you miss me? ha ha
I sat in on the year-end conference call today. I always sit in, and normally, I just lurk. But the operator wouldn't let me through...guess I am not an institutional investor.
But CEO Doug saw it happening on the screen, and a minute after the call ended, the phone rang, and he asked me if I wanted my question answered.
We talked for over 20 minutes, mostly about the MCP (Mobile Commerce Platform.)
Let me just give you a high level summary right now and then I will come back and dig deeper as I have time.
This type of platform is really heading in 2 different directions. In North America, the focus is more toward the "googleization" (as I would call it) of the marketplace...getting you to use your mobile phone as a 2nd wallet, marketed to you as "convenience", but really with the greater value to all the players (retailers, phone cos etc) of gathering your personal data so advertising can be really poinpointed by point of purchase data.
And apparently Android phones are often full of malware...hmmmm.
In other markets, the big issue is safety and security. Especially in countires where there is a lot of fraud and corruption. So where you have a husband working in the UAE and family in say, Afghanistan, how do you send the money home? You can use Western Union, but there has to be an office/depot at both ends.
Or...where you have employees who are handling large sums of cash in a potnetially unsafe situation, how do you protect them?
Or even, when you have a women's cooperative that gets funding from a Grameen Bank type organization...unbanked, husbands who will seize and whittle away the borrowed cash (don't laugh, it's been proven).
Enter the e-wallet platform. It's a form of virtual banking for the unbanked. For them, the cell phone becomes wallet #2 in a very different way. The fellow in the UAE can send money directly to his family, the delivery person doens't need to handle cash, and the women's coop protects their assets...;)
There is a lot of interest in this second type of usage by international aid organizations and foundations, and even banks. Part of it is convenience, but a big part is security. In other words, the market, the identified need is there, and there are sizeable players looking for platforms to implement it. And Vendtek has the basic platform in place. So it's not about creating a market but filling an already defined need...being in the right place at the right time with the right product.
OK, that's all I will write for now, but I did want to make one last remark about the call. Analyst Robin Barstow asked, since the North American PP market is declining, should VSI sell the Canadian operation and sink the $$ into Brazil. It, IMHO, was a curious question...like...so if if Big Mac sales are down, should McD's get hived off ? He doesn't "get" that VSI is not in the pre-paid telephone business, they are in the transaction business.