Interviewed by Muktadir Mubassir, Team MBR

Thriving on turning complex challenges into strategic opportunities, Ms. Mumtahina Anika has spent the last five years building a chain of successful small businesses across multiple districts of Bangladesh. This journey has allowed her to understand how SMEs operate, their needs, and how to best adapt to their habits. With Zatiq, the vision is to help millions of SME business owners and entrepreneurs start, run, and manage their businesses using their ecosystem. Zatiq is an ecosystem of connected point-of-sale tools and services that are designed to accelerate business digitalisation and financial inclusion across Bangladesh and beyond. Her background in SME with in-depth knowledge of finance and experience in operations and management has allowed her team to shape products that they believe will help SMEs adapt much more quickly. Team MBR was in conversation with Ms. Mumtahina Anika regarding her journey through entrepreneurship and her vision for Zatiq.

Muktadir Mubassir: You have had an impressive journey in a variety of roles at different companies and even created a business chain at the age of 15. Would you share a pivotal experience from your early entrepreneurial endeavours that significantly shaped your approach towards creating Zatiq?

Mumtahina Anika: From the very start of my entrepreneurial journey, my main focus has always been creating an impact in whatever I do. Starting a business chain at 15 was not just a venture; it was a series of trials and valuable lessons. Failures and struggles were unavoidable at the beginning of my career, but rather than demotivating me, they sped up my learning curve and made it possible for me to use these insights to my later projects. This early start gave me a significant advantage. I learned to identify unique solutions and adopt strategic thinking rapidly. These experiences were fundamental in shaping my approach to building Zatiq, where thinking innovatively and acting decisively are part of our core philosophy.

Muktadir Mubassir: Zatiq offers a range of services, including POS software, tableside QR, business accounting, calculator, Bluetooth receipt printer, and inventory management. Could you provide an in-depth understanding of how these services work and how they empower SME businesses?

Mumtahina Anika: Zatiq is an ecosystem of integrated products and services designed to help SME business owners start, run, and grow their businesses. From managing daily sales to accessing financial services to maintaining customer relations and increasing sales, our products and services help at every stage of the business. We built different types of products for different stages of business, but all our products are focused on achieving the same goal for the business.

Muktadir Mubassir: Zatiq PocketPay is a service aimed at allowing customers to pay with their cards upon delivery. Could you explain the mechanics of how this service functions and your strategy for introducing it to the Bangladeshi market?

Mumtahina Anika: Zatiq PocketPay is a pocket- size card payment machine. We introduced it to help logistics, transportation, and delivery companies collect bank payments from customers’ doorsteps and other out-of-office locations. Given it is a payment-related device, it is taking a bit longer for us to roll out the devices to the masses to ensure all regulations and security measures are upheld. However, given the launch of TakaPay and the push towards a cashless society, we see mini-pocket-size POS devices playing a crucial role in the future.

Muktadir Mubassir: Expanding the services of Zatiq towards regions like Khulna, Sylhet, and Chattogram will inevitably enhance the speed and efficiency with which businesses operate. Would you kindly share how your team is ensuring a smooth transition and broader adoption of services in those regions, along with its scalability both domestically and internationally?

Mumtahina Anika: None of our products were designed keeping Dhaka alone in mind. We chose to set up our main operations outside of Dhaka, but our ambitions and products are by default designed with the local and global markets in mind. Product scalability is part of our core strategy. We are continuously testing our products in different markets within Bangladesh and other emerging markets like Bangladesh.

Muktadir Mubassir: Adapting to new technologies can prove to be challenging for merchants with limited experience in dealing with technology. What strategies have increased their participation in these products and services?

Mumtahina Anika: Dealing with merchants daily has taught us that not all business owners have the same perspective towards technology. We have seen micro-merchants more tech-savvy and eager than larger merchants. At the same time, we have seen micro-merchants who are not interested in learning even the basics of technology. This has shown us that we needed to deliver the same solution in different mediums to different business owners. Hence, our wide selection of POS products is connected together in an ecosystem. Zatiq’s point-of-sale solutions are available in a calculator, in a mobile app, in a POS tab, on a tablet, and on a computer.

Muktadir Mubassir: Availing of Zatiq’s EasyBill service can simplify transactions and accounting with image recognition as well as reduce the time required for cash memo writing. Could you please share how this technology works as well as its likely impact on SME businesses?

Mumtahina Anika: EasyBill is one of our most successful products. It is a product that started as a simple photo-to-memo maker and over time has evolved into a tool based on the feedback of customers who use it daily to track their business expenses, manage their inventory, access financial and banking services, as well as manage online stores and e-commerce orders. EasyBill is a point-of-sale solution designed for small and medium-sized retail stores. It comes with a mobile app, a hardware tab and printer, and even computer software. We have realised existing retail POS solution companies focused a lot on adding as many features as possible, making it hard and complex to use, so we went bare-bones with this and kept only the essentials, keeping it simple and extremely user-friendly, which has led to its rapid sales growth.

Muktadir Mubassir: Enhancing products and services based on merchants’ feedback can often play an important role during the development phase. Would you kindly share the experiences of the merchants and how their feedback has led to fine-tuning the user- friendliness of your products and services?

Mumtahina Anika: Co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman is known for the quote, ‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you have launched it too late’. At Zatiq, we take this quote very seriously. We believe in launching as quickly as possible and failing even quicker. We do not take time to launch ideas, nor are we afraid to close or pivot when something is not working. We launch a bare minimum product and build it based on customers’ feedback, but we do it very quickly. Even large companies like Google, which spends millions on R&D, have 200+ failed products. That is why we do not spend a lot of time thinking about whether a product will work or not. We launch and find out. Based on the feedback, we either build on the product, pivot the product, or kill the product.

Muktadir Mubassir: Like most digital payment systems, ensuring the security of consumer data is one of the top priorities for any startup working in this space. How does Zatiq ensure the security of transactions, and what measures have been taken to protect customer data?

Mumtahina Anika: We take security, customer data, and other regulatory frameworks very seriously. Zatiq operates in partnership with licenced and regulated financial corporations that handle all this data. In most cases, Zatiq does not have access to any of these data, which could result in a security breach as it is directly collected and processed by the required financial institutions, which are heavily regulated.

Muktadir Mubassir: SMEs are massive contributors to the economy of Bangladesh, and offering convenient products and services to such businesses will undoubtedly elevate Zatiq to new heights. How do you envision the role of Zatiq in the digital transformation of Bangladesh’s economy over the coming years?

Mumtahina Anika: It is a natural process for Bangladeshi SMEs to advance towards tech adoption and digitalise their businesses, no matter the size or type. We have seen this happen in every mature market. But one thing we have also seen in every mature market and emerging market that has digitalised their SMEs is that it was not done using a mobile phone. Even business owners in the most mature market with 99% smartphone penetration do not use smartphones to run their businesses. It is always a dedicated point-of-sale system, such as Square in North America, Zettle in the UK, or PineLabs in India. We believe the demand for a dedicated POS will increase as Bangladesh digitalises its economy.