MatchMove: Business Model Evolution

In early 2009, Shailesh Naik founded MatchMove, a Singapore-based online entertainment service provider. Naik and his business partner had identified a gap in the Asian online gaming market and their vision was to plug this gap with a company-specific platform that incorporated casual gaming, social networking and e-commerce capabilities. MatchMove signed up global technology giant Yahoo! as its first large client. The company also contracted with game developers to create its own store of quality games that it could offer to its clients.

MatchMove’s key value proposition was to act as a conduit between game companies with a high content and low web traffic profile, as well as companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft with a high traffic and limited content profile. It eventually visualised itself as a closed e-commerce system to accept payments for services on its clients’ websites, as well as an open payments portal for all users for multiple merchants. By 2012, MatchMove had further ventured into ‘gamification’, a domain related to its core business.

Fast-forwarding to January 2014, Naik sees an opportunity in the market to create the next technological disruption to e-commerce. His vision is that of an open network which taps into the current trend of catering to the ‘unbanked’ and ‘un-carded’. Will this work? Can he do it alone, or should he look for a partner? How should MatchMove evolve its business model to seize this next big opportunity?

This case will take students through the various aspects of a business model, including a practical approach to designing the value proposition. The case may also be used to illustrate entrepreneurial traits and thinking in an entrepreneurship course, or in a course related to product development, innovation and/or business strategy, as it demonstrates how product development conceptualisation takes place hand in hand with strategy.

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