SadaPay has announced that it has been granted the in-principle approval by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) for an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license. This approval allows SadaPay to ready its operations for the pilot phase, during which the digital wallet will be available on a limited scale, under supervision of the regulator. 

The startup is founded by American serial entrepreneur Brandon Timinsky, who ventured to Pakistan after his last startup in the US was acquired. Over the last year, Timinsky has assembled a team of banking veterans, liaised with the regulatory authorities, and built the foundation for a “digital first” financial institution in Pakistan. Dr. Waqar Masood Khan, Pakistan’s former Finance Secretary, has joined SadaPay as Chairman of the Board.

Pakistan is now the 5^th most populous country in the world, with over 76 million 3G/4G subscribers and nearly 1 million new smartphones users coming online every month. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, internet adoption is only accelerating and more people turn to digital solutions for everyday payments. This presents a tremendous opportunity for SadaPay not only in Pakistan, but also a number of other regional markets that the team hopes to expand to. 

“Sada” translates to “simple” in both Urdu and Arabic. SadaPay’s mission is to do away with the cost and complexities of traditional banking through their simplified digital-first experience. SadaPay offers a smartphone-based digital wallet accompanied by a free Mastercard debit card.

As soon as a SadaPay account is activated, a virtual debit card is provisioned for immediate use. Also, users can perform free and instant transfers to any bank in Pakistan, and withdraw cash from all of the 14,500+ domestic ATMs with no fees (3x per month). Furthermore, users can also load their account with cash at any of 30,000+ retail locations across the country.  

Speaking about the news on the approval, Brandon stated “It’s really amazing to see how committed the State Bank of Pakistan is to adapting to changes in consumer behavior and advances in technology. In the last few months alone, we’ve witnessed tremendous progress by SBP with the release of a number of new regulations that are certain to make an incredible impact on Pakistan’s economy by catalyzing the digitization of its financial system. We’re also very grateful for the support we’ve received from the Bank of Punjab and Mastercard, which will certainly spur our journey towards rapidly expanding financial inclusion in the country”

BRANDON TIMINSKY, FOUNDER OF SADAPAY

Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Waqar said “The role the Central Bank is playing in laying the foundations of a broad-based and user friendly digital payment system in Pakistan is laudable. These efforts have gained momentum since last July. Pakistan would soon be a leading country in digitizing its payment system and SadaPay would play a prominent role to achieve this goal”.

DR. WAQAR MASOOD KHAN, CHAIRMAN OF SADAPAY

Early access to SadaPay will be available for those who have signed up for the waitlist through the website; www.sadapay.pk. SadaPay also has a very feedback-centric approach to their product development roadmap, and they’re also welcoming suggestions via email, [email protected].

Introduction: The Human Resource Management (HRM) is an academic theory and a business practice that is connected with the theoretical and practical techniques of managing a staff . its theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees or the staff are individuals with changing goals and needs, and it should not be considered as basic business resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets.

 The workers take a positive view of Field thinking that all wish to contribute to the enterprise productively and that the main obstacles to their endeavours are lack of knowledge, insufficient training, and failures of process. The Human Resource Management is considered to be the part of a business or company which recruits, develops and utilizes an organization’s personnel in the way which would benefit the firm’s aims and objectives. It creates alignment between an organization’s HRM strategy and the core objectives of a business considered as essential.

Human Resource Management (HRM) is all about managing people, human capital and culture for business success. The human resources management (HRM) function includes a variety of activities, and key among them is deciding what staffing needs you have and whether to use independent contractors or hire employees to fill these needs, recruiting and training the best employees, ensuring they are high performers, dealing with performance issues, and ensuring your personnel and management practices conform to various regulations. Activities also include managing your approach to employee benefits and compensation, employee records and personnel policies.

Human Resource Management is seen by practitioners in the field as a more innovative view of workplace management than the traditional approach. The techniques force the managers of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can understand the workforce, and to provide the resources needed for them to accomplish their assignments. Thus Human Resource Management techniques, when properly practised, seem to be expressive of the goals and operating practices of the enterprise overall.

Nowadays, it has concerned synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to describe those activities that are necessary for the recruiting of a workforce, providing its members with payroll and benefits, by which Staff is administered. These activities require regulatory knowledge and effort, and enterprises can benefit from the recruitment and development of personnel with these specific skills. Academic theory

Human Resource Management aims to help an organization or Institution to meet strategic goals by attracting, and maintaining employees and also to manage them effectively. The academic theory of Human Resource Management is that humans should not be considered machines. Therefore, we should have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the workplace. The Fields such as psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, sociology, and critical theories: postmodernism, post-structuralism play a major role. Many colleges and universities offer bachelor and master degrees in Human Resources Management.

The activities of Human resource managers are involved such as interviewing applicants, staff training, and dealing with laws and regulations within employment. Human Resource Management is composed of seven interlinked activities taking place with organizations.

The seven major HR management activities are given below:

1. Strategic HR Management
2. Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)
3. Staffing
4. HR Development
5. Compensation and Benefits
6. Health, Safety, & Security
7. Employee & Labor Relations.

Within these activities, there are external forces involved such as legal, economic, technological, global, environmental, cultural/geographic, political, and social–which significantly affect HR activities and how they are designed, managed, and changed.

Resource Manager” and that is the only change. Empowerment has been noted as an HRM practice which by critics has been noted more as a pseudo-empowerment, based on attitudinal shaping Other such HRM practices have been noted as hidden within rhetoric, and many examples particularly within call centres are much more Orwellian, and hide the reality, through attitudinal shaping.

Today, unions remain a controversial topic. Under the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, the closed-shop arrangement states employees (outside the construction industry) are not required to join a union when they are hired. Union-shop arrangements permit employers to hire non-union workers contingent upon their joining the union once they are hired. The Taft-Hartley Act gives employers the right to file unfair labour practice complaints against the union and to express their views concerning unions.

The Human Capital: Carmeli, A and Schaubroeck, J argues that “having higher levels of human resources capital were strongly associated with performance only when top managers perceived that these resources provided distinctive value in terms of being highly valuable, inimitable, rare, and no substitutable”

For this reason, the motivation of employee is at the heart of how innovative and productive things get done within the work organization. Before studying the different ways to motivate, we have to give a clear definition of the word “motivation”. Bloisi, W argues that “motivation involves a conscious decision to perform one or more activities with a greater effort that one performs other activities competing for attention”.

Human capital is a way of defining and categorizing the skills and abilities as used unemployment and as they otherwise contribute to the economy. Many early economic theories refer to it simply as labour, one of three factors of production, and consider it to be a commodity — homogeneous and easily interchangeable. Other conceptions of labour are more sophisticated Origin of concept History

The term human capital was first discussed by Arthur Cecil Pigou: “There is such a thing as investment in human capital as well as investment in material capital. So soon as this is recognized, the distinction between the economy in consumption and economy in investment becomes blurred. For, up to a point, consumption is an investment in personal productive capacity. This is especially important in connection with children: to reduce unduly expenditure on their consumption may greatly lower their efficiency in after-life. Even for adults, after we have descended a certain distance along the scale of wealth so that we are beyond the region of luxuries and “unnecessary” comforts, a check to personal consumption is also a check to investment.

Global Presence of Companies: The global debate is on regarding the fair distribution of human capital between the countries. This points to the educated individuals, who typically migrate from poorer places or developing countries to richer places seeking opportunity, making ‘the rich richer and the poor poorer’. When these workers migrate, generally, their early care and education are benefited by the country where they move to work and live their lives. And, when they have health problems or retire, their care and retirement pension will typically be paid in the new country.

Historical HRM from 19th to 20th Centuries: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, The Human Capital in the United States had become considerably more valuable as the need for skilled labour came with newfound technological advancement. These new techniques and processes also required further education than normally of primary schooling, which hence led to the creation of more formalized schooling across the nation.

The early insight into the need for education allowed for provided a Shift to US productivity and economic prosperity when compared to other world leaders at the time. The rights and freedom of individuals who travelled for the want of opportunity, despite some historical exceptions such as the Soviet bloc and its “Iron Curtain”, seem to consistently outweigh the rights of nation-states that nurture and educate them it’s worth mentioning that, the ability to have mobility with regards to where people want to move and work is a part of their human capital. They were able to move from one place to another.

HRM in Several Environments: Being increase in competition, locally or globally, organizations must become more adaptable, resilient, agile, and customer-focused to succeed. And within this change in environment, the HR professional has to evolve to become a strategic partner, an employee sponsor or advocate, and a change mentor within the organization. To succeed in this term, HR must be a business-driven function with a thorough understanding of the organization’s big picture and be able to influence key decisions and policies. The focus of today’s HR Manager is on strategic personnel retention and talents development.

 HR professionals can be e coaches, counsellors, mentors, and succession planners to help motivate an organization’s members and their loyalty. The HR manager will also have to promote and fight for values, ethics, beliefs, and spirituality within their organizations, especially in the management of workplace diversity as compared to the WorkForce of various states. Many companies now have realized the advantages of a diverse workplace.

 As many of them are going local in their market expansions either physically or virtually (for example, E-commerce-related companies), there is a necessity to employ diverse talents to understand the various niches of the market. If want to take the example of China when it was opening up its markets and exporting their products globally in the late 1980s, the Chinese companies (such as China’s electronic giants such as Hair) were seeking the marketing expertise of Singaporeans. This was due to Singapore’s marketing talents were able to understand the local China markets relatively well (almost 75% of Singaporeans are of Chinese descent) and as well as being attuned to the markets in the West due to Singapore’s open economic policies and English language abilities.

Similarly, if we take the Example of Microsoft a Global company and No1Software Company has some values to work in different environments. They are adaptable to any Culture or norms and rules of the Country because they employ the local Talent there besides their working capital already they have with. They rely on local Partners as entrepreneurs for their sales and marketing. In this Line, Google has done remarkable by establishing sites of Various Countries in their languages which have helped them to go forward and become the biggest advertising company for Web.

Billion of ads shown on site as ad words but the main thing they employ the Local talent for boosting their sales. Yahoo is also an International Company in competition with Google and Microsoft. But it shares went down due to improper Human Resource and improper understanding of the local markets of the Various Countries.

Conclusion: Finally, If the Human Resource Management Theory assessed globally, it has brought a revolution in outsourcing and hiring of the staff. It has opened the Vistas of talent and opened the doors of the talent to the Globe. Now opportunities are not limited to the particular Countries. The HRM has proved vital for the Biggest Companies such as Sony, Samsung, Motorola and LG also. They have the same phenomena of taking the products menus in the local languages to sell and market their Products through the Local Human Resource.

With the gradual rise of the ‘Generation-Y’, there’s a seismic paradigm shift taking place in the society. This very shift has significantly altered the landscape of the Pakistani business market as well. The new trends and fashions come and go in the blink of an eye, which calls for a tremendously dynamic marketing and development strategy for the businesses to stay afloat.

A lot of this can be attributed to social media and other various digital platforms that influence the audience to catch-on to or reject an offering or an idea in an instant. This has made the business dynamics of the entire world fairly challenging, with Pakistan being no exception.

However, the recent developments in the way we do things, such as dining, shopping, travel, etc. call for the need to maximize efficiency. Smart devices are one of the driving forces behind this emerging need as they practically put every facet of utility in the palm of our hands.

These conveniences have made way for certain businesses to experience exponential growth for many years to come. With that said, let’s have a look at the 5 most promising investment avenues to consider in Pakistan today:

5. App Development

Bearing in mind the fact that smart devices are the ‘be all and end all’ gadgets for us in terms of utility and convenience, it makes perfect sense to invest in designing an app that offers that utility and convenience. The use of smart device apps is outgrowing all other means of information and utility by a significant margin.

It ought to be considered that Pakistan is internationally regarded as an emerging and promising market for IT and software development. A recent article by DW stated that Pakistan has experienced an exponential amount of international investment inflow in the tech sector during the past couple of years.

In 2018, Alibaba Group acquired Daraz for an estimated 200 million dollars, which was perhaps the founding moment of an impending growth in the sector. Likewise, Careem has also been acquired by Uber for an astounding 3.1 billion dollars.

Since then, various app-based startups and pre-established firms have raised a tremendous amount of funds within a couple of years. All of this money inflow has made the tech-based startup ecosystem in Pakistan fairly promising.

The younger generation of professionals in our country is quite proficient in terms of ensuring technical soundness, aesthetic appeal, and user-friendliness of an app. This is why Pakistan happens to be among the more preferred countries when it comes to app development outsourcing.

A large number of tech-based startups, both local and international, have taken the Pakistani business market by storm as of late helping Pakistan gradually emerge in the global tech-based business market as a force to be reckoned with. Hence, it’s safe to say that app development and app-based businesses are here to stay for the foreseeable future and remain a lucrative investment avenue.

4. Blogging

Blogging is perhaps the ultimate modern channel of information, entertainment, education and opinion creation. For the past few years, the Pakistani audience has been very welcoming of bloggers from various arenas such as technology, travel, lifestyle, cooking, and entertainment to name a few.

This can also be attributed to the emergence of ‘everything digital’ dynamic. Whenever we’re looking for an expert opinion or valid information pertaining to popular areas, we can find it with a tap of a finger, written in a concise, concrete and convenient fashion thanks to some of the really good bloggers out there. Accompany those with the ‘Vlogs’ and you get a complete package.

Pakistani blogosphere is still in a formative phase, which implies that there remain many areas to be explored and tapped into. Some of the critical areas such as automotive, environmental, and business journalism etc. are still up for grabs for an aspiring and competent blogger.

To add to the aforementioned bonuses, the government has also started to recognize the importance of blogging in the modern era as there have been talks of offering financial support to the bloggers in a meeting held between Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecommunication so as to better enable them to portray Pakistan in a positive light.

However, it bears mentioning that opinion sharing and creation arena is a rather sensitive one and makes it important for a blogging platform to add maximum value for the readers in terms of substantiality.

Also, opinionated content is a curse that a lot of content creators suffer from. This is why aspiring bloggers should refrain from opinionating the stories that require more of a deep dive to be told objectively.

If that element is taken care of, blogging is a fairly promising investment avenue that requires a slight bit of patience but can offer huge dividends and a myriad of growth opportunities once it starts to mature.

3. Tour Operation

Thanks to an improved law-and-order situation and the government’s focus, the travel and tourism industry of Pakistan is seeing a remarkable rebirth. The number of travel enthusiasts, both local and foreign, who have been singing praises of Pakistan’s natural beauty and hospitality, has risen dramatically. Due to this, a lot of people have expressed their fondness to explore the country.

Northern areas are the coveted prize for travel enthusiasts in the entire world. During the summer season, thousands of people flock to the north to enjoy the wonderful climate and hospitality. This has resulted in a mushrooming increase in tour operators that organize trips to various locations across the country, especially to the heavenly tourist hotspots in the Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan regions.

Also looking to cease the opportunity to cash in on this resurgence, are some of the international investors. As per the Chairman Board of Investment, Mr. Zubair Gillani, the Government of Pakistan has invited international investment in the more popular tourist attractions in the northern areas such as Gilgit, Swat, Hazara Region and Galiyat.

This recent resurgence of the tourism industry presents a perfect opportunity for the more enterprising travel enthusiasts to start their own tour operating companies. This is an investment avenue that is likely to aid the owners to reap handsome dividends in a short time, especially with the peak season for tourism being just around the corner.

2. Food & Catering

Food is to most Pakistanis what oxygen is to all life on earth. In an interview with Pak & Gulf Economist, president of Pakistan Food Association, Rafiq Rangoonwala stated it the best when he said, “The World Eats to Live. We Live to Eat.”

Our nation’s love for food can be testified by the astronomical number of food outlets in the country. Also, as per Aurora by Dawn, it is estimated that Pakistanis spend almost 40% of their household income on food products.

Additionally, the packaged food industry is also booming in the country. As per the calculations made by Modor Intelligence for the year 2020 to 2025, the packaged food industry is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 5.8%.

Be it small dhabas or fine dining restaurants, Pakistanis’ undying love for food turns these outlets into entrepreneurial success in most cases making the food industry a fair choice for a fruitful investment.

1.    Real Estate

Over the past two decades, the real estate industry has taken off on a rapid upward trajectory with no signs of slowing down in sight.

Pakistani Real Estate sector is one of the most prolific in the world that boasts up to $5.8 billion a year in construction, which is an amount that makes up almost 2% of the country’s GDP.

It’s no secret that a lot of people from remote areas come to settle in the big cities to find work or study, hence, with the growing population and the number of migrants, the demand for real estate projects is only likely to rise. This presents an opportunity to invest and create a revenue stream by various means from buying, renting, and reselling of properties.

Some of the more well-rounded real-estate projects such as Bahria Town, Defense Housing Authority, and many other multi-story residential and commercial projects can serve as a perfect investment platform that promises a growing year-on-year Return On Investment (ROI).

This is perhaps the only investment prospect whereby the use of social media for marketing and business development isn’t done on a huge scale. But that should only serve as an opportunity to better project a real estate venture to a massive audience.

Conclusion

As discussed earlier, digital media has the capability to drive almost every single industry there is. In the current era of fast traveling knowledge and quickly changing trends, capitalizing on the digital media platforms while keeping up with the changing trends and tastes is of the utmost importance in order to ensure sustainability.

With that said, as long as all of the aforesaid elements are accounted for, Pakistan is one of the most promising markets to start a healthy revenue stream through one of the above-mentioned investment avenues.

Via MonthlyBrands