OMNi: Ensuring Zero Margin Between Politics And Technologies

Angélica León, chief strategy officer at OMNi, believes that 2021 calls for a more balanced approach that results in healthy competition and a sense of accountability. In “A Look Forward: What Executives Wish for America and the World in 2021, discover how her firm is focusing on the development of alternative payments to help boost economic recovery.

2020 seems to have been a turning point for digitization and an opportunity to reassess major business disciplines and operating models across all industry sectors. With the effects of supply-chain shocks and a corresponding shake-up in the microeconomic scenes, this year was a challenge for many established companies, while new players have sought to position their business models to capture the market share of incumbent organizations.

With the key theme of disruption, and its corresponding regulatory response to facilitate progressive innovation, one hope that I have for the world is more on the socioeconomic side — the one that sometimes acts as the “invisible hand” in economics. As technologies continue to converge and reevaluate current norms in the business environment, there has been much tumult from the political aspects of many tech-leveraging companies. There will always be parties inclined to exploit these motives, where technologies become ever more omnipotent, and syndicates and public sectors are initially inclined to steer away.

I wish to see that for 2021, the world will discover a more balanced approach that doesn’t stifle competitive rivalry from new service models, while ensuring that there is an implicit sense of responsibility and accountability. Legacy banks tend to be more risk-averse toward emerging financial technologies, only to explore our playbook at a later stage. In terms of the overall competitive rivalry, especially in these more fragmented markets, the focus around technology-leveraging platforms revolves around ensuring their market control, without the forward-thinking orientation that we hope to see as their foundation.

At OMNi, we have pivoted our core business focus and development to offer an alternative to the public for its payment needs, beginning with integrating our e-wallet functionalities to be more interoperable. From that point on, we have focused on further vertical development by developing QR-enabled payments built on a closed and independent payment network, which has now given OMNi the competitive edge as the first provider of such payments in our region. These directions were accelerated due to the uncertainty in our business environment while we decided to leverage this opportunity for greater mass adoption for these new features. Although it may have been risky for any startup to drastically pivot its core offerings — in our case, from mobility solutions to financial services — we are confident that this has generated greater impact and ROI from the development of our proprietary technologies around an urgent need for the local economy.

Overall, this year has been one of the most disruptive times in our memory — and for many businesses, there have been both fortunate and unfortunate events. With OMNi and the market environments in which we operate, it has been a moment where the playing field has been leveled, truly showcasing the capacity of more agile “Davids” to redefine the competitive dynamics against the heavier “Goliaths” in many industries.