Omni’s most recent problem has turned into a larger opportunity for the company. Our initial target market had been Mexican Americans in New York City who send money to their families in Mexico. When conducting primary market research to confirm our assumptions and test our alpha product, we struggled to gain the attention and trust of Mexican and hispanic communities due to a language barrier and lack of connections within those communities. Additionally, we realized that Anti Money Laundering compliance when remitting to Mexico is especially difficult and expensive. In response to these recent discoveries, we decided to strategically shift markets and focus on Indian Americans and Indian immigrants in the UAE who send money to their families back home (India). As a result, we could better gain the trust of potential customers because Indian Americans were more comfortable with using their mobile phones to remit money as most of them are middle- to upper-class with a bachelor's or master's degree. Additionally, the size of the market increased by making this strategic transition as India is the largest remittance recipient with over 60 billion dollars in annual transactions, dwarfing that of Mexico.
In addition to the findings above, we recognized that while our fee-based revenue model was functional, it was highly inefficient. By offering premium services to our vendors, we were able to double our projected revenue model. Our first premium service was inspired by our meeting with Irv during our first immersion trip to Silicon Valley. After our conversation we constructed, and later confirmed, our hypothesis that the greatest barrier to point of sales accessibility for small sales businesses is the cost of digital payments, not the POS service fee itself. As Omni is able to offer free digital payments, we can provide POS services for just a monthly subscription cost, without card processing fees. As a result, Omni can open up the POS market to the millions of vendors who previously couldn't afford it. Simultaneously, this would expand Omni’s vendor network as it would serve as an added incentive for vendors to join the ecosystem. Using these POS metrics, Omni can further monetize by offering vendors additional features such as preferential user routing. (i.e. if Omni recognizes via POS metrics that a store lacks foot traffic during certain hours, Omni could offer preferential user routing to that location during low traffic hours for an hourly fee).
Another added benefit from switching our target demographic to Indian immigrants is a reduction in legal fees. Because the largest percentage of Indian Americans reside in New Jersey, Omni will be applying for a domestic monetary transfer license in New Jersey instead of one in New York. The New York domestic license costs around $200k in legal fees and requires a minimum of $250k in liquid assets and bonds. In comparison, New Jersey costs around $5k in legal fees and requires $100k in liquid assets and only $50k in bonds. Additionally, the timeline required to obtain a New York monetary license is around 2-5 years while New Jersey is just 6 months. As a result, Omni will be able to launch its product quicker and spend less capital on legal fees.
Farouk Aboughazale