How to increase Grabpay market share?
A Product Strategy Question for Product Growth
I recommend using the framework below to tackle this question.
- Clarify the questions
- Identify market leaders in this industry
- Analyze the market trend
- Suggest growth strategies
- Summarize the opportunities for growth
1. Clarify the questions
- In terms of increasing the market share, what exactly the business goal is? Is to increasing the numbers of transaction? or increasing the numbers of users? or entering into new market?
- If interviewer allows me to decide, I will go with increasing numbers of transaction. Majority of Singaporean(~77%) are using E-wallets now. That is, the adoption rate of E-wallets are very high. Instead of targeting new users, I will more focus on increasing # of transactions.
2. Identify market leaders in this industry
Grabpay, DBS Paylah! and FavePay are the key players in Payment market in Singapore.
- Grabpay — GrabPay can be used not only to pay for Grab rides and GrabFood deliveries, but also for in-store purchases at merchants displaying the GrabPay QR code.
- DBS PayLah! — DBS PayLah! is an e-wallet app that allows users to perform transactions such as funds transfer, NETS payment, QR code payments, bill payments, and other in-app and online purchases.
- FavePay — FavePay is a cashless mobile payment feature on the Fave app. It doesn’t store any money in-app, unlike its peers. Users can receive cashback or discounts when you use FavePay to pay selected merchants with the FavePay QR code.
3. Analyze the market trend
Let’s talk about what is driving the payment product growth.
4 digital banking licenses were issued last year in SG. Singtel & Grab won a digital full bank license and it’s an advantage for Grab to unlock the opportunities to build more payment features, like providing deposit account without any deposit limit and enabling the lending service to un-banked or micro SME.
Leverage AI and Machine learning to analyze user payment behaviors and credit score will be in demand. This could allow product to know user better and predict user shopping behavior and proactively fulfill user needs at the right time. For example, I would know when will users receive payroll, what categories they shopped most, how many amount they are short to buy a product so that I could offer lending service to them.
Remittance could be another battle for Grab as there are many overseas workers in SG and have strong need to send money back to their hometown.
4. Suggest growth strategies
Now that we have looked at the competitive landscape and market trends, I would like to brainstorm ideas for growth. I think Grabpay should follow growth strategies based on competitiveness, acquisitions, and innovation.
Competitiveness
Grab is the only one company with SG digital banking license. Grabpay can leverage this advantage to expand more use cases. For example, it could enable the lending service by analyzing the user’s credit score. Unlock different services if they get higher credit score.
Grab has already partnered with merchants and drivers to support different payment use cases. It should try to reduce the payment friction or make it simple by recommending the best payment method to get points. It could be recommend the credit card with highest cash-back or Grabpay deposit to get points.
Security will always be the top consideration for payment service. Enhancing the security or risk management system will protect and build better trust with users. We can build a security portal to bring the clarity for users to protect deposit. For example, installing in-app security software or enable 2FA.
I would prioritize credit score system as it have more opportunities to extend the payment use case to different business and retain users to pay with Grabpay frequently and lead to more transactions.
Acquisitions
As credit score could be leveraged in different use cases like enabling payment instalment for shopping, getting personal loan, easy hotel checkin, or hassle-free in leasing a car. Acquisitions in this space would make it faster to acquire more transactions by partnering with different business, which would also help promote Grabpay service as users could benefit from his credit score.
Innovation
Some innovated ideas could be done with this credit score.
- Grant student to pay by parent’s top-up
- Open API for credit score
- Higher score, more points if pay with Grabpay
- Exchange currency while traveling
5. Summarize the opportunities for growth
In summary, I think Grabpay can grow market share through strategies that include competitive differentiation, acquisitions, partnerships and innovation.
In particular, Grabpay could leverage its strengths in getting SG digital banking license and start to build the credit score system to expand into different business like e-commerce, travel or car leasing. With more use cases be built, Grabpay would have high likely to grow transactions rapidly.
