eSEWA – A Complete Game Changer

Imagine establishing a car company in a country where there is no no proper infrastructure for a car to operate. Lots of challenges right? Similarly, when esewa started its journey to replace cash with digital transaction, there was no proper infrastructure for it to run smoothly.

But today, people rarely carry cash for transaction. From paying utility bills, groceries, online shopping to pay for government services, esewa is functional every where.

History

In a developing country like Nepal, to reduce crowd in every cash payment sector and to save precious time of people, an online payment gateway esewa was established. Conceptualized by Mr. Biswash Dhakal, president of F1 Soft International, esewa started its journey in 2009 in a beta phase which was re-lunched as full version in Jan 25, 2010.

Since then esewa has been a game changer and inspiration for all the people in the sector of innovation. As the first payment gateway of Nepal, it is also an inspiration for other digital payment gateways.

Aim

15 years earlier, if someone mentioned that it is possible to pay your electricity bills without visiting the associative office, without standing in the long queue, with some digits displaying on your device replacing cash, would you have believed that? No right?

Mr. Dhakal imagined a completely new way to make peoples’ life easy by completely replacing the dependency on cash to a digital platform where people never have to worry about carrying bulk of paper notes and lash here and there to pay there bills. This was the primary aim of esewa that people never imagined to be possible.

Struggle & Growth

Esewa was lunched as a fully functional payment gateway in January 25, 2010. At this time internet service was not fully accessible to all the people. This was the biggest challenge for esewa. At 2011 esewa only had 7000 users among which only 3000 were active users. Analyzing this condition we can conclude that esewa was in complete loss. Due to the lack of internet, it was also very difficult for them to promote there service.

Year 2014, this was the year when Nepal took a whopping leap in the sector of smart devices like smart phones which led to wide range of internet accessibility. This was a good chance for esewa to gain market.

For any payment gateway and e-wallets like esewa, it is crucially necessary for it to be secure. But, how could a person trust that a new innovation dealing with peoples’ economy is secure enough to do the transactions? It was not even verified and licensed by NRB (Nepal Rastra Bank) at the time. So, it was a big challange for esewa.

But with a strong marketing strategy, esewa had almost 1.1 Million downloads in playstore upto the end of 2015 (app lunched in December 31, 2012). It not only was winning peoples’ trust but also ruling the industry being the one and only e-wallet and online payment gateway. In 2017, NRB finally licensed esewa as a payment service provider after which other similar services started establishing and growing. According to surveys upto 2024 esewa has 20,276,161 users among which more than 7 million active users transacting more than Rs.200,000 every single day.