Company
Payer is in Doha for QITCOM 2019
We were invited to Qatar's biggest technology conference as a visiting startup, to show what we are building and to meet the people who fund and partner with companies like ours.
Haris ·
We are in Doha this week. Payer was invited to QITCOM 2019, Qatar's national technology conference and exhibition, as a visiting startup, and we are spending four days at the Qatar National Convention Centre with the rest of the Entrepreneurship Zone.
QITCOM runs from 29 October to 1 November and is organised by Qatar's Ministry of Transport and Communications. The programme this year has over 90 speakers, 300 technology exhibitors, 100 startups and more than 300 innovators and entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurship Zone we are in is split into five areas: the Startup Hub, CodeCamp, Make the Deal, IdeaCamp and the Innovation Theatre.
Why we went
A payments company in the Maldives spends most of its time in rooms where it has to explain itself from the beginning. Going to a conference like this is the opposite of that. Everyone in the hall already knows what a wallet is, what an acquirer does and why settlement times matter, so the conversation starts at the interesting part.
The part we came for is the startup and investor matchmaking, which puts local, regional and international investors in the same sessions as the startups exhibiting. We are not raising with a deck and a promise, we are raising with a product people in Malé use to pay their bills, and it is useful to say that to people who see a hundred payments companies a year and can tell you honestly where ours is weak.
The other reason is less commercial. Most of the hard problems in Maldivian payments are not unique to the Maldives. Small markets, bank integrations written for a branch counter, regulation that arrives after the technology. Someone in this building has already solved a version of each of those, and asking them is faster than inventing it again from Malé.
What we are showing
The same thing we would show anyone at home: bills, recharges and a wallet that settles instantly, on a phone, in a country where most of that still means a queue. Being described as an innovative digital startup is a kind thing for the organisers to say. What we would rather be described as, eventually, is the normal way people here pay for things.
If you are at QITCOM this week, come and find us in the Entrepreneurship Zone. If you are reading this from home, we will bring back what we learn.
