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Eko is a mobile banking company. It is different from other SMS-based bank applications in India. Users make payments and transfer money simply by dialing numbers.

About 60% of Indian population is unbanked and Eko targets them and right now it focuses on the 1,000 kilometer corridor between Delhi and Bihar.

The accounts created for the users are actually held by the State Bank of India. It insures up to 100,000 rupees per account. But that does not mean Eko’s customers have to go into the banks, they don’t ever go. The tiny corner groceries available in every neighborhood and street corner, urban areas and expansive rural areas in India work as the “tellers”. In India these stores has a very important role, specially for the poor and rural people, which sell medications by the pill, shampoo in tiny sachets, cell phone minutes by the Paisa, and frequently extend credit when needed. Eko wants to tap this trusted source of vendors to sell one more thing.

The interface is simple enough for anyone to use (even it has crossed the language or literacy barriers)-

• Eko transaction
• Eko customers type the bank’s short code
• then an asterisk
• then the mobile number of the person you are paying
• then an asterisk
• then the amount
• then another asterisk.
• Then comes the signature.

Signature is an important part because the account is solely on phones, which can be stolen. In general RSA token is used to validate such online transactions involving money. But Eko’s founder Abhishek Sinha wanted a cost-effective equivalent of an RSA token. So, he created a paper version of it. A Eko account holder gets little booklets with pages of 11-digit codes. Among these 11 digits, 7 digits are random numbers, with four randomly placed black marks, where the person enters his or her PIN. This means security because even if the booklet is stolen, no one can find out the PIN number and can’t access the account. Sinha reached out to VeriSign to see if they could come up with a better solution- instead they endorsed his and every booklet has got a VeriSign logo on the back.

Freedom from always having to carry cash has obvious safety and empowerment implications. But this is a hard company to build out broadly in a country like India. The very strength of the model to truly reach the unbanked-turning those

Turning the trusted, neighborhood grocers into tellers is a costly and time-consuming effort because there are so many of them serving relatively small neighborhoods and villages.

Eko has 30,000 account-holders right now. “I thought it’d be a million by now,” Sinha says. “We’ve had a lot of false starts.”

The service was launched in late 2007. Eko first outsourced the management of the grocers to a third party who sells multiple things through the channel already. But the product needed more hand-holding and so the number of accounts wasn’t growing. Since last November, Eko has taken over the management of these grocer accounts. It has assigned employees to each neighborhood and invested in street promotions (it has used Bollywood cinema-eque jingle extolling the virtues of banking) and bedecking stores with in-store signage. Now opening of new accounts are increasing. Eko had just 6,000 accounts before the switch in strategy. It added 10,000 in January and is now adding 10,000 every 15 days.

But costs of managing and operation have gone up a lot. Sinha, who made some money founding a previous company Six DEE Telecom Solutions, self-funded the venture until now. Eko also got a $1.78 million grant from the World Bank and The Gates Foundation. But that will not be enough. Sinha is working on raising a venture round now and he hopes to get a whopping $10 million.

The business has a huge social need and business opportunity and it is scalable but it lacks capital. With enough investment it can become a profitable business model soon.

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The company

Rose Associates is an 80-year-old real estate marketing and management company. It is based in New York City. The company has 200 employees. It manages about 20,000 luxury apartment units.

The idea

Bob Scaglion, Rose’s senior managing director of residential marketing, had the idea. The company generates lead for their business using Twitter. It uses Twitter’s search function for lead generation. The strategy works fine for them. In Twitter many people often send messages about apartment hunting travails and these people are targeted by Rose Associates.

 ”Our clientele is young and upwardly mobile,” Bob says. “Twitter is where they are.”

It is easy to find customers who are looking for what you sell. Simply visit search.twitter.com and type in keywords. Rose uses 10 key terms for their Twitter search- such as New York City apartments, moving to New York City, and no fee rentals.

When someone uses one of these phrases in his/her tweet, the marketing department sends a reply message with a link to Rose’s apartment listings.

The result

No followers? No problem!

Rose has only 200 followers on its Twitter account. Not great right! Well, it’s great for Rose Associates. It generates 100 leads a month from Twitter by sending a few targeted replies every day. According to Bob, about half of those leads convert to actual rentals, which is pretty good, because this marketing system does not cost anything.

How to find leads faster

Finding leads faster through Twitter is easier now. There are many Twitter applications that will continuously search Twitter and will send you an alert when a keyword is used. Try using TweetDeck and a Web service called DemandSpot like Rose Associates (both are free).

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