Brian elucidates a world of underbanked, underserved consumers that we don’t hear much about – many lessons for global entrepreneurs interested in unleashing fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to SurgePays.

Brian Cox: I’m the CEO of SurgePays. I’ve been a business builder for 20 years. My main focus has been building companies that service the underbanked. Most of my companies have dealt with recurring revenues through telecommunication or financial services. That has been where I found my niche.

We have been using words like underbanked and underserved long before they were mainstream. It’s been a really fun ride because we’ve been able to provide services that people want and need. It’s gratifying to grow a business by helping people. Now we’ve been able to really merge my two main revenue channels that could help the most people.

We’ve got a two-headed monster. We’ve got one company that is a software platform that enables the owner of a community store at the grassroots level to activate a Prepaid Wireless account and take payments for any of the hundred million prepaid wireless customers out there through several financial products, reloadable debit cards, and gift cards to help that store to be a quasi-bank for the underbanked right in the neighborhood.

That has been a really good platform and a launch pad for our other product. It was actually born out of the COVID situation with low-income families not being able to connect to the classroom. I don’t think most of the world outside of the sector that we’re in realizes that there’s that large a community that didn’t have access to quality internet. We own two wireless companies and shifted them more into mobile broadband categories specifically to provide internet to low-income, underserved folks that didn’t have traditional access to things we take for granted.

As of right now, we provide service nationwide to over 175,000 households. Their primary source of internet is through mobile hotspot devices that we deploy. We do feel that we cornered the market in this underbanked sector by providing internet directly to consumers and also having the software platform set up at the stores where these consumers shop.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning. The business that you started with, was that the prepaid wireless card?

Brian Cox: Way back, it started with prepaid home telephone and long-distance cards. If you went into a convenience store 20 years ago, there would be those four-foot sections of calling cards. Then that’s what evolved into wireless. Our software platform digitized all that. There are about five companies like us out there where it’s more real-time.

It dawned on me one day when we were head-to-head with Bell South in the southeast that we were going to have to sell to folks that Bell South doesn’t want. How do you sell phone services that don’t have credit? We can set up a way in their community where they could activate the service and make payments. They just pay upfront instead of paying in arrears. That was the birth of prepaid.