Mobile Money Transactions

Pingit hopes to monetise your phone number, just as PayPal managed with your email address

Pingit hopes to monetise your phone number, just as PayPal managed with your email address Running for the last few months in the United Kingdom, Barclays mobile phone payment system 'Pingit' is gaining traction in the market. It's one of the first systems to hit the UK smartphone market, and that first mover advantage in the UK is being pushed home with an extensive television marketing campaign.

Running on iOS Android, or Blackberry smartphones, the application allows you to send money from a bank account tied to your phone number by the application to someone else using their mobile phone number. Initially limited to Barclays Bank customers at launch, the service is now open to all UK bank account holders, and users the Faster Payments System to ensure same day transfer times.

The benefit of Barclays doing this is clear - where PayPal monetised your email address, nobody has yet managed to fully monetise a mobile phone number in the same way. The system itself eschews extra technology such as chip and pin card readers or NFC hardware, but relies on something everyone has in their possession.

If Barclays can make this work, and get it established while other systems are tied up in the courts, they'll have played a blinder in establishing the de facto system in the UK. Watch Pingit carefully.

Isis calls up some reinforcements against Google Wallet

US mobile payment venture Isis (which you might recall has the backing of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile) has announced three new financial institutions on board with the service - Capital One, Chase, and Barclaycard.

Add that to support from the main merchants (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discovery) and a number of the top tier handset manufacturers, and you can see that this NFC based solution has some big building blocks it can use in the upcoming trials in America.

Isis shares many features with Google Wallet, which is going to be useful as consumers familiar with one system will find that the other works in pretty much the same way. That's important for confidence, but with all those names behind Isis, there's even more to deliver. Essentially, if the man or woman on the street had to choose a platform, they'd probably go with the one that had lots of big names they recognise, including the bank that they use.

With this announcement, Isis is standing up as if to say "people will choose me."

The Isis trials commence this summer in Austin and Salt Lake City, and while that gives Google Wallet a good head start, with a year of field trials on the NFC enabled Galaxy Android handsets, that advantage can be overstated. A solid trial for Isis and an accelerating adoption of NFC technology in mid and high end smartphones will see customers being presented with the choice their network favours. Google Wallet has Sprint, while Isis has the other three US networks. That balances it out nicely.

Now let's have the competing systems iterate themselves towards the best solution for the public.

Where art begins, NFC will follow on the Parisian Metro

There's a  lot of effort being about to get people to pick up and use mobile money systems. No matter if they are peripherals for your smartphones, using NFC and QR codes to link a handset to an account, or reimagining the loyalty card, there is always a bit of carrot involved, from a refund on the cost of the equipment to buy two get one free voucher offers to stimulate spending.

But if you move up your hierarchy of needs, after the basic physiological needs are fulfilled by the above trigger, there is something more artistic that can help push your technologically adept payment methods. And the is art.

Perhaps the Paris Metro has the right idea. They're introducing a new transit card, the Passe Navigo, designed by Philippe Starck that simply screams "I'm French and I am beautiful". For example, it's designed to be read in the portrait orientation to give it more "energy". And in effect it's a great big NFC card.

Which means not only does it look smart and stylish (helping adoption by the users) but it paves the way to bringing NFC enabled smartphones into the system with no disruption at the ticket barriers, point of sale, or third party agents dotted around Paris. Just switch on the app for the NFC in the smartphone to match the card, and you've got yourself a mobile payments system that works both old school with your artistic cards, and new frontier with a smartphone.

Style and substance. That's smart.

Heads up, Facebook are making their next mobile money move

Innovation in mobile money is all around us, but we've written here on Mobile Money Transactions a few times that one of the companies to watch is Facebook. They have a functional currency in use (the Facebook Credit System), they have ways of bringing money into the system either direct through deposits or via in-store gift cards, and they are a trusted brand on millions of mobile devices around the world.

Now they've went public on their plans to pair up the Credits system with all those mobile handsets around the globe.

Speaking at Mobile World Congress, CTO Bret Taylor, he pointed out their work with numerous (unspecified) carriers and their work to make mobile web payments easier. If Facebook's goal is to connect people, then a lot of that connection will involve money. In theory the money will be moved by Facebook (who will have their rake when they pay out to app developers), the carriers will take a transaction cut, and the users will have paid via Facebook, a trusted brand.

It all seems so simple.

Yet when you think about how much more data that will let Facebook gather, and how much influence they have in directing traffic through their algorithms for the news feed on your Facebook homepage, you can see where there is even more value for Facebook to get involved.

As we said before.... watch Zuckerberg's company.

Telepin Surpasses One Million Merchant Mark

Earlier this week we celebrated a major milestone at Telepin - we reached the milestone of surpassing one million merchants active on its global customer's mobile money networks. Additionally, the company now services over 132 million subscribers via mobile operator deployments in the Middle East, South East Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

The growth of mobile money, mobile commerce, and mobile payments continues as the single most value added service on which operators have focused their attention the last several years. The overall growth of our customer’s merchant networks and the significant achievement of one million active merchants truly illustrates the market need for our solutions. And based on market activity, the explosion of these markets will continue for the next few years. We see greater demand for our mobile transaction platforms than we ever have globally

Read more about this milestone here.

WaridPesa bring mobile money to Uganda

Another new entrant into the highly competitive African mobile money market has arrived. WaridPesa will bring mobile banking to Uganda, and

It's making all the noises you would expect, with a promise to target the unbanked population who carry mobile devices, with a quick and easy sign-up (in this case a passport sized picture and a copy of their identity card) that will be active immediately.

As with other new entrants in Africa, WaridPesa allows cash to be transferred between users on different mobile networks - a vital part in taking a system out of a limited trail mode and into the real world. Money is loaded on to an account in a similar way to buying airtime, through national distribution points around Uganda, and can be sent on to existing users or others with mobile phones, who can then lodge the money in a WaridPesa account or withdraw it from the same chain of distributors.

It's the same implementation we've seen time and time again here at Mobile Money Transactions, but that simplicity should never overlook the infrastructure required to launch a financial project on a national scale - and a project that needs to work pretty much all the time because when this is the only "bank account" that people have, it needs to stay accessible and easy to understand.

Partners need to be brought on board too - in the case of WariPesa this include Equity Bank, a financial institution with regional experience in money transfers.

As we start 2012, it is great to see another small step to bring mobile money to more people in the world, and from more companies to help rive the competitive nature of this business.

Paypal seek knowledge, not profit, in Swedish NFC Trial

Paypal might be happy to publicly push solutions for mobile payment that are slightly more low tech (such as their new Paypal Card recently demonstrated to 150 US companies), but that doesn't mean they're going to stick their head in the sand and ignore shiny toys and new technology such as Near Field Communication (NFC).

The festive season saw Paypal run a limited trial of NFC in Sweden. Available at two stores in Stockholm, it allowed Android and iOS users to download a dedicated application called PayPal Instore, that would talk with with tags around the store that would register what a customer was purchasing, confirming the amount at the end of the shopping trip.

The goal, as with many limited trials that were run during 2011, is not to create profit but to generate knowledge. The trial helps PayPal understand what customers, and more importantly what the retail merchants are looking for in a partner such as PayPal.

There may be some small successes in 2012 in mobile payments, but for companies that are looking for the multi-billion dollar prizes, they need knowledge, experience, and partners who are all reading from the same page of the payment script.

That's why PayPal, even with their noises about ignoring cute ideas like NFC, will still run trials, and keep themselves in the various strands of the payment game

Telepin Powers New Etisalat Afghanistan mHawala Service

Today Etisalat Afghanistan commercially launched mHawala, its new Mobile Money Services platform and we are pleased to share that Telepin is providing the infrastructure for the service.   The mHawala service is a full mobile financial services (MFS) offering that includes central bank cooperation, banking ecosystem participation, utility merchant involvement, and salary disbursement, which enables complete mobile banking capabilities and future cross-border money transfers.
 
Dr. Ali Asgharzadeh, Chief Commercial Officer-Enterprise at Etisalat explains, “Mobile density in Afghanistan is currently at 50 percent and is growing rapidly. However, 95 percent of Afghan’s do not have access to banking infrastructure. This unique market cross-section creates a need for the investment we are making in Telepin’s Cayman platform.  We can now introduce a much-needed innovative service to the market with mHawala. We have chosen Telepin because the company is a key leader and innovator in the mobile money marketplace.”
 
Telepin’s Cayman Transaction platform plays a key operational role in the distribution and management of airtime, and will be extended with subscriber wallets for MFS services.
 
Etisalat Afghanistan is the first mobile network operator in Afghanistan to offer this entire range of Mobile Financial Services. Telepin MFS products provide mobile operators the ability to deliver robust financial services offering to their subscriber and merchant customers. Telepin’s software plugs seamlessly into existing mobile infrastructure, leveraging the investments already made in charging systems, replenishment systems, and value added service delivery platforms.

M-Pesa transfers more Kenyan money that Western Union

Listen carefully and you can hear champagne corks flying as mobile payments company M-Pesa confirms a huge milestone in Kenya... transferring over $1 billion dollars in a single month. They reckon that this is more than the incumbent company, Western Union, manage in the same period.

This growth, which has been achieved in around four and a half years is one of the success stories of not just mobile money, but in a connected internet service as well. While M-Pesa has some big backers, it's still had to go in and start the service, promote it, manage the growth, and continue to innovate and work to maintain its lead in the marketplace. Congratulations all round to one of the poster-children of the new payment industry.

The question now is where M-Pesa will grow. There are still huge opportunities in their home markets, where only one in three mobile phone users has a bank account, Given that mobile penetration is on the order of 40%, but growing, there are a lot of users and transactions for M-Pesa to work on winning over the next four and a half years.

We'll continue to watch their progress.

Nokia brings more NFC to America with MTA and Windows Phone

Time to join the dots, as I pick up on previous stories spotted for Mobile Money Transactions, namely the rise of NFC handest from Finnish manufacturer Nokia and the announcement of a trial of NFC payments on the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA). Tucked away at the bottom of a press release from Nokia's annual developer and media conference, Nokia World, was the news that Nokia would be supplying the hardware for the trial.

While that event (and all the PR around) is for the new Windows Phone, Nokia's head of NFC Jeremy Belostock confirmed to NFC World that their more established Symbian handsets would be powering the trial, and pointed out the update to the Nokia 603's NFC capability to allow NFC enabled SIMS.

The Nokia 603 runs the latest version of the Symbian - Belle - which is getting the plaudits in the press as a mature and well-designed update to the long-running operating system. It's unlikely that the 603 will see any mass adoption, but as with many NFC trials this will be more about gaining knowledge and understanding best practices rather than gather tens of thousands of users.

What's more interesting is the comments that Nokia are working with Microsoft to have NFC capability included in the road-map for the next version of the Windows Phone operating system. Given that Nokia launched their first two Windows Phone handsets at the same event, with a US handset due in early 2012, and almost wall to wall advertising in the launch market of the UK, it looks like the NFC ecosystem will have another major smartphone choice to go alongside Android during 2012. And that can only be a good thing.