Henri, Hans and Charles Pauwels are the founders of OVERVIEW; an Android personal finance management app that enriches your mobile payment services. i.e. a diary of your finances.
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Tell us about yourself
Henri, Hans and Charles. An entrepreneurial family founding team combining product design and development—used by millions worldwide—with innovation management and 30+ years of international business. Our business is built around user experience in banking. We are based in Belgium, but we work globally, with a focus on emerging markets and developing economies.
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What exactly is Overview all about?
Overview is an Android personal finance management app that enriches your mobile payment services. It is a diary of your finances. Just like a diary, it is built to be friendly, engaging and highly interactive. What’s more, we fill it out for you. Through engagement we assist our users to gain complete control of their finances and start building their dreams.
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What makes your product (Overview) unique?
The smartphone generation lives with the user experience of YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. They have a whole range of the most advanced mobile payment systems at their fingertips. At the same time, they are underserved where personal finance management is concerned. That’s what Overview provides: personal finance management tools that has the same UX and UI standards as what today’s users expect. An app that puts their needs and wishes first. Moving quickly from reporting transactions to becoming a pro-active financial assistant. Being able to send reminders for loan repayments or KPLC tokens for instance.
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What has been your most preferred way of marketing Overview
Overview is quite pragmatic in its way of operation. We aim to initially prove organic growth before throwing marketing money at it. We have created and designed some social/viral features, in order to incite people to share is as much as possible.
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What challenges have faced since you started developing the app up to now?
The main challenge was technical! We really had to understand our users need and situations before we could start building something. That’s why we did about 100 user interviews! We have realized our product needed to be fast – I mean very fast – on even the slowest Android 4.1 phones to create value for our users. The product also needed to be lightweight, otherwise too many apps or pictures would have to be deleted! On top of that mobile data is not cheap in Kenya. This means that users turn data off and on; our product has to deliver its value even when offline. All of these technical difficulties, have made the development of our application a bit more difficult but we believe that what came out is very promising.
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How did you overcome such challenges?
What we had to do is proceed very carefully and make smart decision for every feature we included in our app. Charles, our CTO, has leveraged his years of experience to build an application that runs on the most modern back end structures – coincidently they are the most secure as well – in order to make an application that is extremely lightweight. Only 3.5 MB! What’s more, the application has part of his logic on device. This allows us to deliver push notifications and visualization for every transaction, even without access to the internet.
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Why did you select Kenya as your target market for this technology?
We selected Kenya because there is a need. A need for users to understand their finances. Users that for generations relied on cash only, but now have access to the newest digital finance systems. But without the tools to understand them. Without the tools to manage their finances across providers: easily, effortlessly, and efficiently. Without the tools to make the right financial decisions, at the right time, for the right circumstances.
Additionally, Kenya is the home of mobile money. Kenya is miles ahead of Europe concerning mobile services, a user can get a mobile loan with Tala, M-Shwari or Branch, he/she can send money from phone to phone instantly,… It became quite clear for us that Kenya was going to be our first market.
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As the founders of Overview, what do you love the most about working on the app? And what prompted you to develop the app?
Our family said, from the very moment we decided to start a new venture that the project needs to have a measurable social impact and have the possibility to scale. Also I believe this application allows us to tick both of these boxes. It is such a privilege to be able to deliver impact in so many places around the world where we have seen that people are severely under-served with financial interfaces.
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Finally, what is your advice for young entrepreneurs who would like to venture into tech industry?
Be passionate about what you do! It will show when you go to potential clients and potential investors. Being passionate about what you do, is a never ending source of energy. Secondly, be transparent in what you say and what you do. Transparency avoids delays, it enhances trust and it is way more manageable… Thirdly, in our opinion the essence of a good venture is one that listens to the needs of their customers. If you really tackle issues for them, selling won’t be as difficult… And finally, never ever give up!
Overview Technologies BVBA
20 Rue Camille LemonnierÂ
1050 Brussels – Belgium
