Razer co-founder Tan Min-Liang (center). Photo credit: Razer.
Razer boss Tan Min-Liang is a showman. He started a firestorm after tweeting at Singapore’s prime minister and proposing to turn the country cashless within 18 months.
He kept his promise, releasing an executive summary of his plan to the public just over two weeks later.
The plan was the talk of the tech community town.
“This proposal to me is a huge chunk of marketing fluff,” writes entrepreneur Isaac Chua on Facebook. He runs software consultancy firm Future-Proof Software.
“Razer has a good shot,” counters Shawn Teow, an independent researcher and writer.
Not just a PR stunt
The move is seen as good publicity for Razer. “The marketing is done right; the general public received it positively. Quite a good proposal in such a short time,” says Ngai Pui Shing, an engineer and manager at a port operator.
Razer says it’s actually serious about implementation. “We submitted the Razer E-Payment Proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office with the desire to contribute to Singapore and we are confident we can pull it off,” a spokesperson tells Tech in Asia.
The website for the proposal lists job postings for Razerpay, including a lead engineer role.
While critics lament the lack of technical details about how Razer can succeed, the company says that the finer details in the rest of the report are not meant for public consumption.
Obstacles ahead
How challenging is it to roll out a city-wide epayments system? Chua, who’s worked on software integration in the government sector, says Razer’s proposal of spending US$7.4 million to acquire one million users in 18 months is unrealistic.
Just developing a product that can support that many users will take at least 18 months, he says. The process of hiring a core team alone could take three months.
“Setting up the hardware and data center for the application alone can cost US$3.74 million. Sorry, you can’t host this kind of nationwide solution that deals with money on the public cloud.”
Maintaining a full team to manage, develop, sell, market, integrate, administer, and secure the whole system would exceed the amount Razer is earmarking, he says. Onboarding merchants will be another challenge.
An army of competitors
A cautionary tale
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