The mass consumer market has long been excluded from sophisticated service offerings due to the inability of legacy systems to support micro transactions and product models not catering for infrequent payment patterns.
In an ever-escalating compliance-orientated world, rendering offerings to the significant middle mass market has become even more challenging.
Rather ambitiously, given our resources in the context of other participants in the International Financial Sector, we set out with a true desire to change the world for the better, by alleviating the difficulties that consumers in the mass market face daily.
We saw innovative technology as the right tool to do just that. To keep costs down in such a cost-sensitive market segment, we needed volume. Volume that only a global scale can provide.
We then set out some 9 years ago, with limited financial and human resources, to accomplish our extremely ambitious international expansion dream. During this time, in our startup phase, we had to learn new skills, travel the globe, and employ vast resources and new technologies to form our unique products in the melting pot of cultures and solutions, that our business has become today.
Most importantly, we had to learn how to reach each market cost-effectively and to engage with consumers in their own preferred manner, whilst gathering crucial clientbase behavioral statistics and building attrition and payment profiles, by offering services over a minimum period of 2 years in each market.
As a somewhat disillusioned South African entrepreneur, Francois Olivier assumed the role of business development director for Prosperian in Mauritius in 2014, after Prosperian’s success in South Africa since 2002. At its apex, Prosperian’s South African business reached roughly 2 million consumer contracts, supported by roughly 1,000 permanent staff members. During 2018 Prosperian moved its operation from Mauritius to Singapore.
We had to develop tech solutions from scratch, by utilising technology that was not available even up to a few years ago. Big, multi-national companies would have employed millions more and taken much longer, with substantially bigger teams, to accomplish the reach that we did, so far.
The shear scope and complexity of our project, at times, proved more challenging than expected and we had to find innovative workarounds to make offerings function as intended. Today, we are however, in the early stages of our business’s exponential global growth phase.