Panel: Broadening Horizons: How to Grow Your Revenue with Alternative Payment Systems & Webstores.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we are going to be having a panel and this is going to be talking about how you can uh grow your Revenue with alternative payment systems and web stores uh and to to head this conversation I would like to reintroduce Craig uh and I'll let him introduce our lovely panelists so yeah if we can welcome our panelists on back onto the stage thanks everyone again for uh for joining uh this session sorry that you got to deal with me again uh for those

that hadn't earlier I'm Craig chapel and the head of content at pocketgamer.biz um with me today we've got a fantastic panel and we're going to discuss how to grow your Revenue with alternate payment systems and web stores uh and we're also going to touch a little bit upon alternative alternative monetization um so yeah I guess we'll start uh if you could all please introduce yourselves we'll start with you fil and then we'll work our way down hi uh my name is Fel B I'm the managing director of Tatam plus uh Tatum plus is a by product of Tatum games we are a game publisher uh based out of the Mina region we've been in the market uh for the for almost 11 years uh We've published over 50 plus games uh with over 150 million downloads uh and my responsibility at uh Tatam is to support game developers in monetizing through

alternative payment networks everyone Hi everyone I'm Stephen I'm a father of three so uh it's a hectic houseful so uh so yeah I've been in uh the payment industry for almost 13 years so uh I was I was there on the ground enabling payment methods in APAC uh laam Europe and now f focusing in Africa so with carry first so carry first is a Africa first U uh company uh 80% of our employees are living and breeding in Africa so what we do is uh hyper localization in publishing and we build games uh for low-end smartphones and uh we enable payment methods in uh Africa so me what I do there I'm the Le need product manager uh

for the Gateway team so my team is responsible for all the payment activities at car first yeah so that's me hi um it's me again sorry um Chris Meredith I'm responsible EMA working with Zola Zola is a 900 strong company we have worldwide coverage in every single market and pretty much number one in most of those markets in regards to Payment Solutions so Keen to share those ins sites with you today with my fellow colleagues on here as well and looking forward to having a deep conversations about opportunities and monetization it's a changing landscape massively so no more than can be said from here in this wonderful territory so I think there's going to be an interesting discover from a a varying Viewpoint so looking forward to it hey everyone can everyone hear me okay perfect um so I'm the co-founder and CTO at audiom mob so we bring audio advertising into mobile games and apps

um so we've been growing um quite considerably since 2020 um we've now um onboarded six of the top 10 um mobile gaming companies and are now moving to expanding into Apps thanks very much so yeah fantastic panel that we got to talk about these topics so I guess to start with I'm sure everyone will be quite familiar with with these but we discuss it so what are the kind of the challenges with' getting consumers to be able to spend on their mobile games across the Mena region CU obviously you enable different kind of payment methods but yeah so what are the challenges there yeah so one of the first challenges when you look at the Mina region More than 70% of the Mina region is underbanked or unbanked meaning they have lack of access to digital payment methods like a credit card or a debit card and when you look at Apple and Google uh today there's a limitations in terms of the digital payments that you can use so a lot of those um I would say a lot of those segment of people are are unable to make

these purchases especially when you look at markets like Egypt uh where more than 90% of uh the population is still using cash or you look at Iraq where credit card penetration is below 5% uh so there's a really a huge opportunity today of users who are interested to pay but are unable to pay due to the lack of access uh to a credit card or a debit card um and that goes back to really the reality of how Banks traditionally have been operating in the Mina region unable to segment to that population and really figuring out how to acquire these users uh in order to be profitable in terms of their operational model uh you made a good point on uh on the banked uh on banked population in Africa so when we actually look at Africa so Africa is a mobile first country so when you actually look at

your smartphone so look at your smartphone it's not those smartphones so in Africa it's actually low-end smartphone so basically what that means is that uh you H uh these users don't have spaces on their mobile phone to download apps so you have to think differently to tap in these markets so basically um when you actually develop an app so you have to go back towards the core functionality of your service and enabling the payment so if it's only white background or blue so two colors but it uh if it's sticking towards a core F functionality it gets the job done so yeah I think that's a good thing to share another thing is is that uh in Africa you have to consider real-time pricing so basically what that means is that um in Africa uh the FX is actually super volatile

so uh good to note if you take a good example in Nigeria if we Peg it towards the USD so if you put price points early in the morning if you don't have a real-time pricing the currency can depreciate with 50% so and that's a immediate impact to your business so but it can also fluctuate upwards of course uh and that's a uh disadvantage for a user point of view so that's why it is really important to have have Real Time pricing and focused on low-end smartphone and focusing on unbacked users so I believe with these three factors you're able to uh adopt in the Africa Market um I really think this is a case of access and choice in regards to making sure that whatever Market you might be working in and performing in that you're providing your end consumer or the opportunity for them to being an end consumer with as much Choice as

possible so Payment Solutions making sure that have payment local Payment Solutions at the touch of their finger that they can access and be able to work and interact with in a very easy way is key to this initiative also the fact that it's about Connections the whole point of what we do is we make sure that we connect with the best developers connect with their games connect with the market connect with their end consumer and provide them Solutions all along way and I think there is enough Solutions now in the marketplace to enable that but as my colleague onto my rights talked about we have to be relevant to localized needs we have to make sure that we have an understanding as in Africa it's a predominant mobile community so how do we best affect that Community how do we take a messaging to that Community how do we make the transaction as easy as possible to that Community all of these possibilities are now available to us it's it's all about how we go dirting consumer part of what

I spoke to before there are challenges with that but owning the relationship with your consumer owning the purchase at the end of the day with your with your customer is essential to making sure that there is a thriving life after this making that effort to be able to do that is key in regards to what we need to do going forward yeah and I think on for our side is there's four things I'd probably touch on I think the first thing is um what everyone's mentioned previously on this um stage is that when you have audio advertising it means that we have a relatively stable CPM it actually means that we don't have the fluctuations that you usually see as bad as you'll see on a video um platform for example but I think the second thing which is super important for Regions is that we also um are more lightweight so in a lot of regions where data isn't cheap it actually means downloading audio ads and monetizing using audio ads is actually more effective so it means you're actually able to monetize your users across a region um despite some

places in a particular region being richer than others or having more expensive smartphones than others um and I think the third point and where it's been really really interesting for us is that with developers like keer 4 what they've actually started doing is because they've see relatively stable cpms is actually making it a pool so they actually then collect all of the revenue and then give it back to the users in cash payments um and then I think the fourth point I wanted to mention is that we're also seeing something interesting and something that we're experimenting in in places where currency are volatile is then allowing that um audio ad Revenue to be converted into cryptocurrencies and that's something that we're actually exploring to see if that is also a way so it's almost um listen to earn in that way in a more stable currency that doesn't fluctuate to your point um from morning to evening are you saying crypto doesn't fluctuate as much well I'm saying usdt doesn't not not a variable Bitcoin but usdt doesn't my dose coin would uh yeah

I I wanted to touch a bit upon the Real Time pricing though I thought that was really interesting and I get that I'd love to just learn a bit more about that it kind of makes sense from a developer publisher point of view but how do you kind of square that with players and how do you you know if they see prices change within an app if that's what you were talking about then maybe they might be unhappy to see that if it affects them negatively so how do you communicate that yeah so it's key transparency uh as I mentioned uh in Nigeria for example that's a good example um all of these users are I would say fix Traders so they not understand the fix game so if the prices go up um it could be that the pricing is higher than a comp a competitive price so that's going to be a challenge um so what you have to do is in that instance you have to incentivize in such a way or introduce loyalty

points next to um uh the incent uh the increased price points those are I would say key aspects what you can do uh in communicating up front when the price increases there okay um again it's the relationship of making sure that you understand what the consumer's needs are making sure that you can actually communicate effectively with your consumers and also then you can add value to that proposition the pricing may vary but the add value aspect that you can bring into play around those communication points is essential in terms of managing those expectations none of us can actually manage or control what might what fluctuations may happen in the marketplace but what we can do is we can ensure that the relationship we have with our customers is maintained in a consistent way and part of that is transparency and part of that is trying to add Valu to the proposition of what we actually doing with our our customers

so again it's essential to make sure that you have that relationship with your customers understand what their needs are and journey with them taking care of them along the way to make sure that any fluctuations that may happen are in context with what their needs are so that they can maintain the user experience that they want out of this kind of relationship uh when kind of communicating uh with I guess your customers across the Middle East and Africa I presumably each country requires a different kind of strategy rather than just an overall branching one I wonder if any of you could kind of dive into like the best ways to deal with that OB we've got experience of Africa Middle East and well everywhere let me just touch this may explain it or may not explain it um within EMA obviously which is inclusive of what you just said we are over 200 separate countries Plus 300 plus

languages within that and we've got various challenges going on within these territories as well right now so working at a localized level is absolutely essential and ironically the fragmentation of what I've just explained is where the values at so you need to make sure that you can exploit understand what those local opportunities are and provide a strategy that is relevant to that Marketplace be it Africa countries in Africa the localization of currencies within that will even change at that level so it is hard it is very important that you can migrate through those challenges but I solely believe that this territory with all of its complexities provides huge opportunities in regards to how we can contain customers how we can manage their expectations and how then we can actually take them forward and grow that customer base not sure whe that helps in the answer but no that's good that was great for maybe just following on that

point if you look at the Mina region um there's like three distinct areas you have the gulf Levant and North Africa um and across these three distinct areas um there are very different in dialects uh as well as in regulation and as well as in fragmentation so if you look at the gulf in particular you'll tend to see when you look at payments uh credit card penetration ex especially in the uee is much higher uh if you look at the Levant area you'll notice more debit card penetration is higher and then if you look at North Africa you'll notice actually cash payments uh is much higher so in all of these three different distinct areas there's definitely um a strategy that needs to be focused on understanding who are the local users what are their local preference and how do they actually do uh their day-to-day payments um as an example Egypt in particular particular Egypt has um one

of the most successful fintech companies that focuses on digital payments which is called Fi Fi has more than 4,000 40,000 kiosks across Egypt so that's a kiosk Network larger than a b a bank Network and it's very normal for a lot of those users to actually go to the kiosk make a payment in order to pay their bills or to purchase something online so that strategy is very different when looking at uee where you have very high smartphone penetration and very high uh credit penetration as well yeah fisel I'm happy that you touched upon fari so I think uh we made actually um good points here so I want to take it to one level deeper so I have actually a interesting use case how we enabled Egypt so basically uh what we did uh in Egypt we enabled all the key

payment methods so fari was one of them pay at fari actually pay with Aman pay with Masari then also photoone Egypt and we acquired one of the biggest games in Egypt Mobile gaming so pubg so in paper we had everything right to activate the market so we did seos uh we did paid UA but the market wasn't converting at all so we were thinking deeply what's is going on we had everything inhouse so then we started to thinking going embedding in the culture so we started to Target tier 2 influencers so not even tier one tier two influencer and not specifically influencers uh specific to Pub gbg but a gen General one so we target the influencers in combination with um our Graphics team designing graphics with uh fari as I a uh uh local

accepted payment method and uh and we gave that towards the influencer and you would be surprised um in that moment of time when he was actually streaming his uh content uh about pubg and we offering the product we quadrupled in sales now Egypt is for us actually the second biggest country in uh in Africa so Nigeria being the biggest one but in transaction one we've surpassed Nigeria actually so this is what I want to share with you it's that you have to go like really deep within that culture try to understand that and sometimes you don't have to invest in a lot money to acquire those users yeah you've you've kind of answered my next question I was well I was going to say what what's the revenue opportunity for companies considering alternate payment options in Mena kind of ver so

how much revenue can they get versus what they have to do what how much they have to invest you know is it I guess ultimately the question is how how worth it is it doing that so yeah I can start so there's definitely a huge opportunity uh especially when you you know just earlier as I mentioned that there's a big population today uh that wants to purchase gaming content but is unable to purchase um and there's a big representation of that in the markets that we discuss um as well um other than the aspect of you know a big population that is non aable uh you also have a big segment of users who want to purchase higher volumes than what is typically being sold inside Apple and Google uh so as an example we have a lot of games where we target whale users and those users generally want to purchase uh much more than $100 uh per month uh close to ,000 to $5,000 per month uh and generally those type of

users would require different types of payment methods uh and more of a customized experience and a community experience uh from what we've seen we've seen a lot of um games developers that we've worked with able to increase their pay rates uh and their monthly transaction volumes by giving access to these payment methods um I I think the best narrative to look at it if you look at pubg and you look at free fire those are companies that are generating hundreds of millions of dollars outside of the Apple Store and Google Store through alternative payment methods in the Mina region so that clearly shows that there's a big Market appetite but obviously the most important thing is really understanding does your game um have that local flavor and local touch that appeals to those customer segments um got 11 minutes and I've got two two topics I want to cover but uh so one of

them is I guess do these challenges kind of bring some opportunities in terms of like a preference maybe for alternative monetization models so I guess for example ads where you just kind of remove that barrier um and then kind of what trends have you found in the Menor region for ads I guess wilfred's yeah I can I can um start with this I think the first thing I actually linking to the question you asked before um we're seeing 10 to 20% um up that uplifts from people using or integrating audio ads in an incremental way and I think this kind of TAPS into something that's very unique about um audio advertising versus video advertising we're not advertising other games we're bringing brand spend into the ecosystem and something that's very interesting is actually the Mina region is growing uh 10% year on-ear in terms of brand spend so we're seeing loads of campaigns from STC um from EAD um from Emirates MDB all

of these Brands looking to get into gaming because they know that that is the audience now everyone is a gamer it doesn't matter age gender race Rel everyone is gaming across the globe um and they're finally starting to realize that but they need a way to reach those that audience without annoying them and I think that is the biggest thing here like without affecting retention because if we're all honest no one is actually paying attention to the video ad when it's being played so and the brands are becoming Conant of that fact and they realize well this isn't really effective marketing I I should probably use a different way of doing that and so this is meaning that we've seen a large growth in in our uh year- on-year spend and our partners trer group have been fantastic in the Mina region who helping us with that and I think it Taps into the point you mentioned earlier around they our partners Trevor group are able to help with that Lo or each local market because they have teams in market across the Mena region so actually means that they are getting localized campaigns across different regions at different price points so yes the CPM

you might uh you might get in the GCC won't represent the um the CPM you might get in um in Egypt for example but the amount of scale you get in an Egypt actually ends up balancing out the amount of Revenue you can potentially generate so creates a very interesting Dynamic actually that we have brand spend that's not cannibalized in your game we have um stable cpms because audio advertisers do not are not so fussed about really personalized information um and it therefore means that we have a monetization model that actually is relatively stable doesn't actually affect your retention rates and allows you to um basically make incremental Revenue so it's actually been one of our biggest success stories actually moving out here I think it was like three years ago and actually opening an office and actually expanding out in the in the Mena region just to support that I think this is about embracing change we're in a fluid Marketplace we don't know all the rules we don't know all the game plans yet but ultimately they are changing so

understanding what our offering should be to our consumer and making sure we can do that at a localized level and I think that's the key aspect with all the conversation we coming here even though there's multiple business models multiple ways of doing monetization the only effective way is to understand and Implement that at a local level um we we we exol have had a massive change within EMA in this last 12 months and we've seen significant increase by taking that to a local level taking the customer effect down we focus now as much on new developers new marketplaces and the integration of those guys and what their needs are as much as we do as the Enterprise they are as important and even more so in certain ways because that's where the future growth's going to come from that's where the new initiatives going to come from so it's it's it's encumber on all of us to make sure that we support the local growth of opportunities through the development community to support

that and and just kind of finally on ads like it I think the answer is yes but I I guess and it depends on the country but I kind of ads kind of culturally acceptable across like the Middle East and Africa CU some players despise them some players are absolutely fine with them is there an issue there or so I think in terms of our engag engagement statistics I think we see for on average there's around seven you for each user there's around seven engagements with ads I think it really does depend what you're advertising though and I think you really need to tune into to that and I think what we've seen is the engagement is always the highest on when it's artists when it's music when it's big brands people are really interested when it's like STC people are really interested in engaging with those creatives so we've seen it really does depend what you advertise like people are more interested in a in an ad or brand when it's also engaging also when

it's funny so like so like when we have like celebrity voices um people immediately engage with that more because they say oh this influencer I remember their name or I remember who that is so we've definitely seen that and I think the way you do it is becoming very important I think for all of us in in life in terms of I think any kind of AD really needs to be better than what we were doing before cuz let's be honest I think what we were doing before is quite lazy and not really as creative as it could have been if you really want to engage users so we're definitely seeing the more you engage the more there's a familiar voice the more it's actually not interrupting them the less likely they are to skip so to give another Statistics to to end on is um we see around a 11% skip rate on our skiable act and if you think about that that that is basically the user saying well I don't really care enough to to tap that skip button I'll continue to play the game so that kind of shows the user behavior is saying for the most part the acceptance is there uh I want to quickly touch upon uh kind

of alternative marketplaces and web shops fora time the uh I guess just the general question is how big are alternative app stores in the Mena region are they worthwhile so I think in my opinion my humble opin in the in like say Europe or the US there's limited opportunities with an an alternative at Marketplace because everyone's kind of stuck with the app stuck the app on Google Play but I'm curious if that's different here or you just disagree with me entirely uh yeah it's it's different here different here I I think it's quite popular when you look at uh web shops uh or Marketplace for General gift cards uh so this is quite popular in the Mina region and has been uh for a number of years um um I think it's still early on for other game developers to really penetrate that uh but we're definitely

seeing that Trend we're seeing a lot more uh game developers now uh looking at these Market places and uh these web stores to enlist uh their in-game items and again it goes back to I think the value proposition there is the payments is because a lot of these web stores or um marketplaces have access to local payment methods uh if it's in Saudi Arabia or if it's in the uee or other markets um we're definitely seeing a Rise um and we're seeing a very similar Trend now in China where that uh has been really a frontier now a lot more um game developers are looking at China and trying to replicate what's happening in China um also the the beauty of this region is it's not constrained by history then the the some of the issues and the challenges we have in Europe and in the US are the fact that we got traditional opportunities that are

restricted because of how we go to market that's changing alternative payment methods alternative web shops we've been doing web shops for now 10 years and we've seen a massive change between where it was to where it is today and it's still a gray area in regards to being when you look at statistics from um data I they don't actually forecast what that actually is and I got to think it's in the Realms of approaching 20% yet that is not forecast within what the future future vision of what this Market is worth but again this marketplace now where we are here is open it's a Virgin Territory in regards to how are the best ways to monetize without any of the constraints that we faced before and that's a real Value Point that's why we're spending so much time and effort in creating solid foundation points here because we don't have the constraints of History yeah so like specifically with web shops that obviously there seems to be actually a big opportunity there you were saying about the

percentages what's ex you know all the all the data but like I I was reading like plers financials for example and they make like 25% of their revenue now just from direct to Consumer so that's that's kind of crazy I guess for the Menor Regan and web shops do you have any uh best practices and again how worthwhile is like a specific web shop uh in the in the region um yeah so uh for as Tatum plus we support game developers um in really enlisting their own items on tomat plus Tatum plus acts like a marketplace where we set up separate webshops for each game developer uh on those web shops game developers can enlist their in-game items um and then can offer a very seamless Redemption experience for their users where the purchase happens on tomatan plus but the in-game item is then redeemed automatically um inside the game uh as part of that we also offer uh more

than 40 plus uh alternative payment methods from cash wallets direct career billing uh and domestic card payments uh in addition that we're also helping game developers in expanding to Latin America and Southeast Asia um but there's there are other opportunities out there that are definitely opening up obviously exola and what exola offers Kerry first as well has a propos position there in the region um I think it's still early uh in terms of where we're seeing more and more players coming into the market but it's definitely growing and there are now choices for game developers to explore so I think Fazil and Chris made two really good points so the marketpl side and then also from D2 Seaside I want to touch upon um also one particular use case also from a client perspective so clients also have uh in-game purchases right

so are you if you're able to tap towards that that's also really interesting so I think key payment methods are mentioned here as well so mobile money one of them and a digital wallets um uh as well so every client is striving for that seamless payment experience so it's becoming a buzz word I would say so if we tailor that towards mobile money and digital wallet what basically what that means so I'm a user browsing on Call of Duty mobile for example I want to purchase ing game so I don't want to get out of the game the the the gun what I actually uh wanted to buy so I select uh mobile money so what happens then ideally you want to have a deep link immediately towards the the the payments app so uh MTN for this example so you do the user does a strong customer Authentication there and then the user goes back towards his game and playing

his game as usual but unfortunately not every payment Gateway supports this deeplink functionality so I want to share some uh um okay is solution there as well so what you can do is then um when the user actually uh selects the uh the gun as a purchasing you automatically launch your web browser so the user web browser and then deep linking or then triggering the the the payments app to do the strong customer authentication it's not ideal but it works so yeah that's what I wanted to share so I want to address that more use case as well cuz it's also important uh just like we are just quick very quickly we've got a whole host of best practices we can share afterwards but it is against that choice factor and we've got 700 Solutions in this territory to be able to do that but it's offering your consumer that choice and then guiding them through that process

of integration from the webop solution all the way through but again and I'm hopping on about it understand your consumer understand what their needs are and navigate them at a local level thank you all right thanks thanks very much please give a big round of applause to the panel thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]