Mark Tolley is the APAC Regional Director for inDrive, overseeing nine markets across the region. He has been with the company for around two years and has visited Nepal more than twenty times since. Shivangi Agarwal from The Himalayan Times sat down with him to talk about passenger expectations, safety, and what the future of urban mobility looks like for Nepal. Excerpts: You've been to Nepal almost twenty times in the past year. You clearly know this market well. How do you think passenger expectations have evolved when it comes to urban mobility and ride-hailing? Beyond the kind of core basis, which is affordability, people want reliability. They want transparency. They want some form of control when choosing the services. And what's really important is that platforms adapt to the customer needs, not the other way around. I believe ourselves and many other players in the market globally have started to do that. Over the last 13 years globally, we've really understood what the customer wants, what the customer needs, to help them get from A to B really quickly. How does inDrive define safe urban mobility? The first thing that's important is that safety is not just physical safety. It's how transparent the system that they're using, how robust are the safety features, and do they have peace of mind when they're traveling. If they're informed, if they're in control, and you mix that with the fairness that a platform like ours offers, then that's how we'd probably define the ecosystem of safety overall for the passenger. You've traveled a lot on the roads of Kathmandu. What mobility trends do you observe here? First off, it's so chaotic. The first time I came here about 18 months ago, I had a culture shock. I live in Bangkok, which is quite chaotic as well, but here was another level. The trends we see in Kathmandu are very similar to what we see in Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta. Congestion is growing, the population is growing, more and more people are traveling to work, the economy is growing. But equally, some of the traditional transportation types are either unreliable, maybe a bit fragmented, or still in the growing stages. Passengers are leaning far more on apps to get from A to B. So I think we'll see more growth in the ride-hailing sector over the next few years. We'll continue to see the growth of EV as well. Kathmandu does that quite well. And we'll continue to see smarter ways that passengers can move. We introduced things like comfort class and EV class, and I think these trends will continue to grow over the coming years. What role do transparency and passenger choice play in building trust and a safer ride experience? Any passenger that has uncertainty, there's a blocker for them to want to use the app again and again. If they don't know the price that they're paying, if there are some hidden fees, if their wait time is either too long or they don't know how long it's going to be, sometimes they'll see a five-minute and actually it takes much longer. Then it starts to dampen the experience that they want. So if passengers have visibility, if they've got the choices, then confidence really follows with that. My view is mobility is more collaborative than isolated to just the platform itself. If you set very clear expectations and transparency, then passengers are naturally going to choose you as the default option. Many people associate safety primarily with technology. Is technology alone enough? No. The short answer is no. Technology is critical, along with AI and the growth of that. The safety features like share your ride, SOS buttons directly to the police and the ambulance are super important. But it's also the responsible practices. Making sure that drivers are trained, making sure that drivers understand how to accept the rides, and that passengers are informed as well. A passenger should be able to know who their driver is, how long it's going to take, and whether the registration matches. All this is not just from technology. You've got to give the consumer confidence that when they choose inDrive or any others, that they feel confident in using that application. inDrive's latest campaign highlights the message, 'Agree on your fare, only here.' Why is this concept so important in today's mobility landscape? It's our core belief. Transparency, freedom of choice, and you put that with fair pricing for both drivers and passengers. That package is so tremendous for the passengers and drivers that we believe in it wholeheartedly. A lot of people can try and replicate, but it's in our core belief. It's where we started 13 years ago in a very small town in Siberia called Yakutsk. It's minus 60 degrees for nine months of the year. Mobility there is so important. And what we found was that drivers were, I'll use the word extorting passengers. They were saying, look, we want to go from A to B, and they were just charged these crazy fares. Our founder, Arsen Tomsky, decided to start this application with a few friends, and that's where it was born. We've carried that through now to over 1,000 cities, to 48 markets. We are really the only application that not only allows the drivers and passengers to mutually agree upon that fare, but the passenger has got this list of drivers they can choose from. One driver's two minutes away. They might charge a little bit more, depending on the real-time conditions, but they've got that choice. Or maybe it's a certain car they're looking for, they want a slightly bigger car, they want an EV car. And the safety ratings are there too. We're not going to let drivers on the platform that are constantly running up one, two or three ratings. There are guardrails in place. But if a passenger wants ultimate safety, they're going to look at that 4.9 or that 5 and say, well, I'm going to go with that person. Nepal's government has proposed introducing VAT on ride-sharing services. What is inDrive's view on this development, and what impact could it have on riders, drivers, and the broader mobility ecosystem? This is quite new. The question isn't really whether ride-sharing apps should be taxed. There are already elements of tax that are paid now. A lot of it comes down to timing and reality. Does the framework reflect the current realities? There's a cost-of-living crisis. Passengers and drivers will get squeezed potentially even more. If there's a higher cost, then it's got to be borne by someone. If it's the platform, then there might be less investment. If it's drivers, then their total earnings become less. If it's passengers, they're watching their wallets as it is. We work very closely with regulators and governments globally on these sorts of issues. Is the timing right? Is the framework fully in place? Once we get those answers, then we can really truly assess it. Looking ahead, what opportunities do you see for Nepal's mobility sector, and what should the future of safer and smarter urban mobility look like? The potential is tremendous. We're still in the early stages of this growth. Buses have been around for decades. The urban mobility sector, ourselves and others, we're still relatively new. As the population grows, as the infrastructure grows, applications like inDrive will just continue to contribute to digital growth. Kathmandu is the epicenter of that, but we go beyond that. If we're solving a problem, and that problem is either poor or low infrastructure, poor mobility, or there's a job creation demand, then we should be going there. Any final thoughts? Just that I love Nepal. It's such a great market with so much opportunity. We're seeing this now. The more investments that go into this market, the better the ecosystem is going to grow.