Jerome Torralba, a meat shop owner in Parañaque City, has been experiencing a 10- percent rise in customer traffic and a significant increase in his income since he became a POSIBLE partner.
Moreover, he said, his shop has benefited a lot of people in their area, especially the masses who don’t have access to payment centers. “We save them time and money significantly,” he proudly said.
For the past 15 years, JG Puzon, the current chief executive officer of fintech company POSIBLE, and his team had been pioneering several innovations in telecommunications and mobile commerce for big industry players. However, they observed that micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have been struggling against the big players who have the resources and infrastructure.
Noting that the MSMEs are the main drivers of growth in the economy, three years ago, Puzon and his team thought of helping the MSMEs to level the playing field. Thus, POSIBLE was born.
POSIBLE built the first-generation portable platform that can perform various transactions such as paying bills.
POSIBLE is an easy to use, affordable digital transactions platform that allows you to sell prepaid load, accept bills payment, send money, sell insurance, bus tickets and many more. It is like using a mobile POS. Retailer partners earn a commission/discount/rebate for every transaction done within the platform that provides a range of services that include product training and merchandising materials to help the entrepreneur get started.
Puzon’s POSIBLE team made the neighborhood sari-sari store (variety store) as the core of their project, citing the sari-sari store concept as the focal point of neighborhood commerce and convergence where people would chat for hours, rush to buy basic household needs they missed in the grocery list and make purchases on credit.
Personally, Puzon has high regard for the entrepreneurial spirit of sari-sari store owners because most of the time, they singlehandedly deal with finance and inventory, pricing and promotions, customer relations, loan and credit applications, and even salesmanship.
“The experience and exposure to sari-sari stores became my inspiration to find ways and means to help them to be digitally empowered using technology and innovation. With so many things happening around the tindahan like I said earlier, they need our help, and POSIBLE is here to empower these MSMEs,” he told the BusinessMirror in a recent e-mail interview.
At present, Puzon said, POSIBLE is bullish on the recently launched GEN 2 device. While it has the same functionality and services as their first-generation device, GEN 2 is sleeker and boasts a bigger and wider screen, one that appeals to a younger breed “micro-syantes,” or small traders, and the millennials.
“What is more exciting will be the new services that we will launch soon, the POSIBLE SHOPBOX, which turns your little business into a virtual mall,” he said.
Puzon said POSIBLE empowers the kanto-preneurs, or street corner entrepreneurs and micro-syantes, the center of every community and barangay. It also functions as a place of convergence on the demand side, as customers always pay their bills, send money to relatives, buy load for their phones, among others.
“These customers want convenience and less the hassle of the bigger retail chains. It is the simplicity of the model. On the supply side, our kanto-preneurs and micro-syantes are equipped through POSIBLE with an easy to use, versatile and reliable platform ready to serve the needs of their customer’s right in their own neighborhood,” Puzon explained.
Puzon noted that although MSMEs like the sari-sari stores comprise the bulk of the businesses in the country, they remain fragmented and thus have no bargaining power. “By putting them all in a single agnostic platform, with no corporate agenda in mind because we do not have our own product, it is our aim to unify them and empower them individually and as a group,” he pointed out.
Plus, according to the International Data Corp. (IDC), 30% of sari-sari stores “by 2020 will evolve to become another channel for one-stop payments and remittance centers.” This validates the efforts of POSIBLE to empower the Filipino entrepreneurs through fintech and the business model of sari-sari stores in providing convenience and convergence of products and services.
Right now, POSIBLE has over 2,000 happy retailer partners across Metro Manila and other key cities, who, by using their platform, generate much needed revenue for their small enterprises, while it has over 1.5 million satisfied customers who benefit from the convenience and savings of doing their transactions closer to home.
According to Puzon, actual return of investment depends on how much working capital a retailer will use and how frequent they rebalance their wallet, but on average, retailer partners get their investment back within 8 to10 months.