The WING Cambodia alumni

I was fortunate enough during the period 2007-2010 to lead a simply extraordinary team of people to create WING in Cambodia. In 8 very short months, this team worked huge hours to develop not just a mobile money offering, but an entire business, including property development, regulatory sign-offs, new processes and training and recruitment of dozens of staff. Within another 18 months, the team had helped acquire 150,000 customers and develop access to finance in every province of Cambodia.

With such an extraordinary group of people, it is not surprising to see that many of them are now charting the future of mobile money in Asia and elsewhere. After setting up the operations function, Paul Reynolds is now leading business development for Monitise in South East Asia. Scott Bales moved from the technology team to Fundamo, and is now the Chief Mobile Officer for Movenbank. Regulatory risk and operations expert Michael Joyce is now working with bKash in Bangladesh, and Joep Roest is working with UNCDF handling mobile money development in the South Pacific based out of Port Moresby. David Kleiman has recently worked with the Bank of South Pacific, and Andrew Wilson leads mobile innovation for ANZ in Melbourne. Justin Hadgkiss has recently joined Visa to work on the Fundamo integration in Asia. It is fantastic to see so many of these individuals making such an important contribution to the development of this industry after their ground-breaking work in Cambodia.