ONE DOWN, THIRTY NINE MORE TO GO

Monday marked the beginning of our forty-island journey to provide more accessible and affordable financial services to the countryside. Our basic mission was this: to equip and enable countryside or island-based municipalities with mobile commerce platforms that will help them expand their markets and improve their processes, efficiencies, and ultimately, their productivity. Inaderwerdz...tinuruan namin sila mag-Smart Money. Hehehe.

Together with a team of our mobile money consultants, I boarded that plane to one of the farthest places I've been to in our motherland--Ozamiz City. Later during the day, a barge took us across Pangil Bay to a small town in Lanao del Norte to train a group of coop officers on the features and benefits of our mobile money product.

The trip was an insightful, exciting and memorable one, and one that would even go down in my books as the most dangerous trip I have ever taken. And Pangil Bay ain't named that for nothing, because ultimately, we crossed it to avoid the jaws of captivity and death--one story that I would really rather forget.

If you ask me now, would I go through that experience ever again? The answer would still be yes. Because I truly believe that the new frontiers of our nation--our future producers and consumers, our country's next 4 billion, truly deserve access to affordable financial services. It is a cause worth fighting, living, maybe even dying for.

And so our journey continues...on to the next financial bridge across the sea!

EKS-OH-EKS-OH