Iqra lives in the small village of Gondal, hidden away from the urban civilization, some 70 kilometers from the Capital city of Islamabad. It has a small neighborhood school, where Iqra received her matric certification. With no higher education institutes in the village and ambitions beyond her current qualification, Iqra continues her education by studying online courses on Youtube on her small smart phone, gifted to her family by an uncle who works in Dubai.
Exposed to the outside world through her mobile phone, Iqra learns English and online freelancing to find ways to add to her family income. However, in the small village market, getting data packages is a hassle. She often has to visit the retailer, the sole khokha/mini-karyana selling mobile cards in their village run by Afzal chacha, only to find out that he has run out of scratch cards. He tells Iqra to come back in a few days, once the Telecom sales person replenishes his stock. Iqra also inquires about the new data package she saw in an advertisement on Youtube which provides unlimited data in a nominal amount for the entire week, but is disappointed to find out that Afzal chacha can only procure scratch cards and no special data packages are available at his shop. Iqra has to abandon her learning journey for days, as the small market volume makes the village a low priority serving area for any of the telcom’s serving officers, and replenishing the small retailer takes a long time.
There are millions of people across Pakistan who yearn for access to the digital world. With low penetration of banking services, getting connected to communication services such as Internet data and media apps on the phone, or receiving money from your family in another part of the country, is facilitated by the local retailer.
The neighborhood retailer is the access point to the digital world for millions of Pakistanis like Iqra across the country. Over 20 million people visit the local retailer every day to get connected to digital and financial services. Despite clear demand for these services, retailers struggle to procure such services from distributors. Providers of digital and financial services, whether it is telecom companies or banks, have proprietary, overlapping and costly distribution, more conducive to serving high volume retailers in larger cities, than focusing on the long tail of micro retailers serving the masses. To become attractive to the big companies, small retailers like Afzal chacha have to invest in larger prepayment of stock from each company than he can sell in a given day – more money he can afford to tie up given his limited financial capacity.
Enter OneLoad. A retailer app that aggregates numerous telecom and banking services. Oneload enables micro retailers like Afzal chacha to provide over 50 telecom and banking services to people like Iqra, while
freeing him from making prepayment for more services he can sell in a given day. Retailers do not tie up their money against a particular service at the beginning of the day, using what they need as and when a customer walks into their shop.
OneLoad was conceived by Muhammad Yar Hiraj, a technology entrepreneur who developed this app in partnership with Systems Limited, Pakistan’s leading technology services company. The app has served more than 150 million walk-in customers since its launch three years ago and is regularly used by over 32,000 active retailers across the country.
OneLoad is the access point to digital world for the masses through the neighborhood retailer. The company is rapidly expanding its retailer base and integrating numerous financial services including EasyPaisa, Jazzcash, and other banking services (such as cash deposits and withdrawls, money transfers and account opening for banks) to generate more income for the retailer with minimal pre-investment. Oneload’s contribution to the digital economy and its business model was recently acknowledged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, through its announcement of an investment in the Company.
On her recent visit, Iqra presented a soiled fifty rupee note to Afzal chacha for a mobile top-up. He smiled and recommended a new weekly bundle instead which included unlimited data usage in early hours of the morning. “Now you can start your lessons right after fajr without worrying about running out of data!” Afzal chacha is now a OneLoad retailer.
