Two years ago, Hal Bosher, CEO of Yoma Bank, made his fintech move. Mr Bosher, a former employee of the World Bank, was attending a business conference at an upmarket Yangon hotel with executives from Norway’s Telenor Group, a few months after the telecommunications giant won one of two contested licences to provide mobile phone services in Myanmar. Mr Bosher joined the Telenor table at lunch. “He was very persistent,” recalls Vibeke Krohn, then with Telenor. “There was my boss and me and Hal and he would just not leave us. He said 'I want in on this' and he was right.”
The outcome of Mr Bosher’s assertive manner was Wave Money, a fintech joint venture between Yoma, a medium-sized Myanmar bank, and Telenor, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and run by Digital Money Myanmar. “What [Telenor was] looking for was a very strong local partner who satisfied governance requirements,” says Mr Bosher.
