While most businesses plan operations along the vertical & horizontal ranges, not many pay deserved attention at their intersections – missing opportunities to be innovative – and thus missing serendipitous outcomes.
Mobile operators must constantly endeavour to innovate along three levels – their networks, the devices being offered, and app offerings – identifying technologies which can serve multiple industries.
For instance, an operator using mPayments to aid medical insurance in areas where banking services are scarce, and where people are otherwise largely uncovered by private medical insurance schemes.
Further, a lateral strategy can service vertical domains where users might not be willing to pay for them outright. For example, a mobile operator tying up with a local fertilizer company which wants to advertise its products to farmers via text messages, for which it pays advertisement fee to the operator. The subscribers could get a broad array of locally useful agriculture related content designed by the fertilizer company for free, which, on the other hand could induce them to sign up for paid offerings such as mobile micro-insurance.
Mobile Micro-insurance is yet another adjunct vertical market which would find a suitable flavour and customers in Mobile Agriculture subscribers – especiially having a tremendous scope in geographies such as Africa and the Middle East.
Irregular weather patterns, droughts, and other dangers to crops and livestock make them an obvious market for insurance. If we take just Africa for instance, currently an estimated 44 million people have insurance compared to an overall mobile subscriber base of around 600 million – a huge, untapped market.
What’s required in such regions of mobile operators looking to harness the potential of mobile micro-insurance is not simply low-priced premiums but coupling them with flexible payment models.
Maryland-based telecom research powerhouse TeleResearch Labs examines many more such potential strategies aimed at leveraging economies of scale in mobile vertical markets such as mobile Health/ Money/ Retail/ Telematics/ Agriculture/ Manufacturing/ M2M etc. in its latest project: Vertical & Horizontal Worlds of Mobile.
