What are the main barriers for Skype to enter the remittance market?
Cross-Border Payments
Asked by Question Bot08/Dec/20141 answer
1 Answer
F
Faisal Khan
Answered 08/Dec/2014
Inside story from a colleague who worked very closely on this: When Microsoft purchased, the go-forward plan included a lot of possible directions (or branches) Skype could take. Remittance business was one of them.
The idea of creating a global money transfer service was not something new, and both Skype and Microsoft knew about its potential. However, in the end, it was decided that Skype was a big enough integration and management issue, adding and managing the payments layer on top would be a major distraction.
Then when the co-founders left Skype, the plans were dropped altogether.
Coincidentally, on the list of projects that Microsoft is looking into, one of them under debate (i.e. consideration) by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, is payments. Skype is also mentioned in the report.
Payments is a crowded market and they want to be sure of what they get themselves into, if they decide to go ahead.. No decision has been made (else we all would have heard about it). MS wants to get into payments, that would adequately qualify it to play with the big boys in the payments space, but there is a lot of internal debate if they need to enter the payments vertical? SAP hasn't. IBM hasn't. Oracle hasn't.Why Microsoft?
The idea of creating a global money transfer service was not something new, and both Skype and Microsoft knew about its potential. However, in the end, it was decided that Skype was a big enough integration and management issue, adding and managing the payments layer on top would be a major distraction.
Then when the co-founders left Skype, the plans were dropped altogether.
Coincidentally, on the list of projects that Microsoft is looking into, one of them under debate (i.e. consideration) by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, is payments. Skype is also mentioned in the report.
Payments is a crowded market and they want to be sure of what they get themselves into, if they decide to go ahead.. No decision has been made (else we all would have heard about it). MS wants to get into payments, that would adequately qualify it to play with the big boys in the payments space, but there is a lot of internal debate if they need to enter the payments vertical? SAP hasn't. IBM hasn't. Oracle hasn't.Why Microsoft?