Aditya Menon is the Executive Director of Obopay and previously he was CIO at YES Bank. He moderated the panel that discussed the topic, ‘Challenges in Financial Inclusion’. He started his talk by telling that a balanced approach is important. He pointed out to the fact that 10% inflation hits the bottom of the pyramid very heavily and this needs to be addressed. He showed positivity that there is opportunity to address the problem. The Global payments opportunity size is huge.

Retail Payments : $10 Trillion
Check and Cash Replacement: $55 Trillion
Ecommerce and mCommerce : $500 Billion
P2P : $400 Billion

India is seen as a crucible and a terrific place to experiment. The size of the opportunity is huge. He said that people should have universal access, consistent, Adequate distribution network and great experience like the UID project. He mentioned there is clearly a need for innovation and the way the schemes are packaged and branded interestingly to reach out to the common man.

He emphasized that Transactions should have low cost per transaction in order for it to be viable for the under-privileged people. Its also important for any mature economy to adopt a universal payment model.

Vijay Anand, Sulekha’s Head, Strategy & Business Development listed about 6 trends as per his observation, in the publication business.

First and the large trend is, there is a dramatic shift from print to internet.

Second broad trend is increasing amount of self service, which wasn’t present 3 years ago. Self service marketplace has emphasized a walk in kind of mode for publisher.

3rd largest trend-as a publisher, we have realized that growth is noticed in tier 2 cities-both for buyers and sellers

Forth trend: Significant action is coming from new countries- Malaysia, Singapore etc, far more than US and Europe

5th- We’ve far more focus on twitter and facebook. If done in right-way, fb, twitter and other social media can drive huge traffic.

Last trend is, if you had invest significantly in offline in recent past, it will start paying off now.

Bikky Khosla, CEO, TradeIndia.com spoke during session 2 on the sourcing aspect of B2B.

B2b offers marketing solutions and sourcing solutions. Every SME is not only selling products and also buys products. If you don’t keep an eye on your vendor and keep prices in check, you’ll be outpriced. Hence sourcing is equally important.

Net gives you excellent visibility, which traditional ways didn’t provide us.”I’m a strong believer of regional trade. You know your customer, time taken is much less” so focusing on regional market will be more effective.

Biggest complaint from international clients is that Indian exporters do not respond fast enough. We need to work on this and have to be more active and responsive, using the internet medium. Many companies are still on free emails. Its important to have own domain and email addresses, because international customers may not have seen you, but they identify you through your website and email. Its important to have right identities.

Only problem we face on the internet is trust. There’re many ways to take care of that. TradeIndia.com offers credit report. Which help a lot in verifying credit worthiness of the other party.

SMEs need to be very active on B2B to gain from it…

Session 2 would focus on B2B Market Places: Catalysts for SMEs growth

Mr Namit Pandey, head, Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo India, will be moderating the talk.

Excerpt from session Moderator’s talk:

All of us have to follow our customers wherever they are, irrespective of size of our business. Question is, is ICT the right medium to address our customers?

Starting point is, if the customers have moved online? and answer is Yes, Customers have moved online. Internet today is bigger than any radio, TV or newspapers.

There’s a myth that internet is urban and caters only to youth, but the truth is otherwise.

There’re 10-35min SMEs in India but only 0.5 million domains in India, starting point for an online presence.

So what is the best way forward?
Start with web presence, followed by online advertising.
A website can give SMes a one stop online business solution. Expand the market, transact through e-commerce, manage your customers, promote business through scalable low cost medium.

Subsequently use Listing services, search marketing, ads…

Namit ran us through several examples of SMEs using web medium and reinstated that “You’re left behind if you’re not online”

How does Yahoo help?
Yahoo has small business group, which can help for domain booking, hosting, 1000 business email ids and data transfer, all at very nominal cost.

Yahoo helps reaching out to target customers. 8lakh organizations listed on Yahoo Local. Most of the services are free.

Other offerings from Yahoo include Display ads, Search Marketing and other premium services

Shailesh Rao, Managing Director Google India set stage for session 2 discussions by posing a prominent question: why does mobile advertising matter?

Why should people care, why it is useful. What’s in it for various stake holders? Why should they care about Mobile adverting among all other media…?
Answer was given by Sanjay Singh of One 97

Why it is important? Because you can’t think of any other medium where you stay close 24×7. Mobile is kept close to someone all the time, not TV, not paper. Mobile is huge medium which instantly draws attention. The opportunity of reaching an audience at right time is huge. Real hardcore targeting advertising can be done only in mobile ad.

What scares me of is: email was great medium for one to one communication. People ended up giving up fair amount of information while signing up. This could have been used for targeted advertising, but as we know this was used for spam. Similar thing can happen in mobile ads, when corporate ads are sent out, they turn out to spam. – Sanjay Singh, One 97