Payer is a Maldives national finalist at the SAARC Startup Awards

Payer is a Maldives national finalist in the season 2020 SAARC Startup Awards, the South Asian round of the Global Startup Awards, in two categories: Best Newcomer and Startup of the Year. The entry describes us in two words the whole company agrees with: one-stop payments.

The awards run in three rounds. Countries pick national finalists, the national finalists compete regionally, and regional winners go through to the global round. So this is the first of three doors, and the one where the Maldives is judged against itself.

Being judged next to the region

The interesting part of a competition like this is not the trophy, it is the comparison. Our neighbours send blockchain platforms, accelerators, co-working spaces and connectivity startups, all from markets much larger than ours. Sitting in the same bracket as them is a useful correction to the way a small market distorts your sense of scale. Being the biggest payments startup in the Maldives means very little on its own. Being a good one by the standards of the region means something.

It also puts a specific question to us. Best Newcomer is about what you have built lately. Startup of the Year is about whether the thing you built matters. We would rather be strong on the second, and we know where the gaps are.

The year this happened in

2020 has been a strange year to be a payments company here. Movement restrictions did to digital payments in a few months what we expected to spend years arguing for: paying from home stopped being a preference and became the only option, for bills, for groceries, for food. We shipped Food and Grocery in April into exactly that.

None of that was a plan, and we take no credit for the circumstances. What it did was remove the hardest objection we used to face, which was whether people here would actually pay this way. That question is settled now. What is left is our own work: more providers, fewer failures, faster settlement, and the regulatory footing that lets a company like ours do this properly.

Thank you to everyone who nominated and voted. We will let you know how the next round goes.