Why we're building Payer

Paying for the ordinary things in life in the Maldives takes more time than it should. Electricity at one counter, water at another, the internet bill somewhere else, school fees on a morning you took off work. Every one of those payments has an office, a queue and a set of opening hours attached to it, and none of them know about each other.

The odd part is that the country is more than ready for something better. Almost everyone carries a smartphone, we are online all day, and we happily do far more complicated things on these devices than pay a bill. The payments around us have simply not caught up. They still run on processes designed for a counter and a receipt book.

So we are starting Payer, with one goal: make payments simple and hassle free.

One place for everyday money

We want Payer to be a single platform where you can manage, pay and keep track of everything you spend on in a month. Not a separate app per service, and not a separate trip per bill. One place, on the phone already in your pocket.

Here is what that looks like to us.

Bills. Electricity, water, mobile, internet, cable TV, school fees, gym membership, insurance. All of them visible in one list, payable at two in the morning if that is when you remember. You should be able to see what is due, pay it, and be done, without leaving the app and without wondering whether it went through. Airtime recharges and gift cards belong in the same place.

A wallet. Top it up by bank transfer, by card or with cash, and pay instantly from it anywhere on the platform. A balance that is ready to spend removes the slowest part of most payments, which is proving who you are and where the money is coming from, every single time.

Appointments. Booking a doctor or a salon is a payment problem wearing a different hat. You call, you wait, you hope someone wrote it down. We want you to book the slot and pay for it in the same few taps, and we want the merchant to handle reminders and reschedules without a phone tree.

Tickets. Cinemas, sports and events sell to the same people, one queue at a time. An electronic ticket bought in seconds and checked at the door is better for the people running the event and for everyone standing outside it.

A marketplace. Retailers of every size should be able to reach the whole country without building a shop online from scratch, with payment and settlement handled for them. Bring the shop to your fingertips is roughly the idea.

Cards. Not everything happens on a screen. A card connected to your Payer wallet lets the same balance pay for a ferry or a taxi, in the places where tapping something physical is still the fastest way to pay.

The merchant side of it

None of this works if it is good for customers and painful for businesses. A merchant taking payments through Payer should get the money settled to their bank account and be told the moment it happens, should be able to see transactions and settlements without asking anyone, and should be able to reach their own customers with a reminder or an e-bill instead of a phone call. Integration should be something a business can finish, not a project it has to staff.

Security is not a feature we will add later either. Payment data and customer data are the whole of the trust we are asking for, and they get encrypted and handled properly from the first line of code.

What comes next

We are at the very beginning. Right now Payer is an idea, a lot of sketches and a small team in Malé who got tired of standing in the same queues as everyone else. The next stretch is research and prototypes: sitting with the people who pay these bills and the businesses who collect them, and finding out where the real friction is rather than where we assume it is.

Some of this will take time, because it depends on providers, banks and rules that were not written with the internet in mind. That is fine. We would rather build the thing that should exist and be patient about it.

We will write here as we go, about what we ship and what we learn. If you deal with any of this every month, and especially if you run a business that collects these payments, we would like to hear from you at info@payer.mv.