Technology as we know today is growing at a very fast pace. We enjoy sitting in our comfort zone and doing things online.

We have built machines which can get things done without our intervention. We are living in a world where technology is thriving.

The lazier we become the more we invent, so we have a chain of reaction driving automation. Laziness drives innovation, innovation drives technology and technology blooms businesses.

Nepal is slowly adapting to this shift towards online systems. Most of the people here believe in money making and when it comes to spending they do it valiantly. Adapting to change here is difficult and takes time as people rarely care.

ATM use has been exponentially growing and a very few percentage of customers use mPOS to pay bills. Internet banking is minimal and online wallets have a very slow progress as well.

There are a very few online food and clothing stores and buying online is still considered unsafe.

So why go online? We here are comfortable with whatever we have got. We don’t want some unsafe sophisticated technology to complicate things. I want to knock a punch here, “Why on earth do we use cars when we can walk?”

The world’s first online operational payment gateway came into existence in 1995 and was implemented by Cyber-cash. To be certified, each vendor’s application suite had to demonstrate the ability to process a full set of card transactions (authorization, settlement, charge backs, reversals, etc.) from end to end.

We hear a lot of online payment gateways these days from PayPal to Paytm and there are systems using GSM networks instead of the Internet like Bkash through which 15% of the total economy of a country like Bangladesh flows.

These systems have been said to provide online banking to the unbanked economy enabling people to pay and transfer money through their feature phones. Simplicity is the key here, press some keys, enter amount, press enter and you are done.

The physical cash use is minimal causing easy access to money transfer and bill payments through their existing handsets.

Nepal has a similar kind of platform. Primarily, something new is extremely difficult to build due to lack of enthusiasm from the concerned parties and secondly it takes a massive amount of effort in convincing and educating people on these kinds of systems.