britone mwasaru

M-Pesa has being winning because it has made money transfer fast, safe and reliable compared to sending money using the Post Office or using buses that would reach where you are sending money to. Safaricom has done this with the most basic technology built on top of the SIM toolkit. This goes to show that disruption is never about the technology but being able to make customers happy and just working.

Booking a train ticket on the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) trains is nothing complicated. You just use the most basic technology known and used daily by mobile phone users. This technology is USSD if you hadn’t guessed it already. BuuPass has done the same with booking of buses. This has saved the customer money and the distress of getting all buses fully booked after spending time and money to get to the bus station.

Equity disrupted banking by targeting a new customer base that had difficulty getting access to banking. The bank made getting a bank account super easy by reducing the restrictions. Equity Bank democratized banking and banking stopped being a preserve of the chosen few. This allowed folks like farmers access finance.

Disruption is never about the technology. It starts with unhappy customers. Find unhappy customers and make them happy in the most simple form.