Mobile Money Transactions

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.

Africa continues to lead the way in Mobile Money deployment

With over 100 mobile money services around the world, it should come as no surprise to readers of Mobile Money Transactions that almost half of these are in the African continent. With 51 deployments it's very easy to say that Africa is where the revolution will start from.

For all the talk of potential systems from Apple, and trials on the New York MTA, the real action, and social change, is happening away from North America. But what's interesting to me is that as Mobile Money systems become more prevalent and accepted by a society, they begin to have positive side effects.

An increasing number of small businesses are using Mobile Money systems such as M-Pesa to bring down their per-transaction costs on goods and services, making their businesses more viable, more profitable, and able to offer a wider range of services to their customers... all because of the flexibility that they have to make and take payments.

Given that the current systems have a huge scope to be extended in the near future, it's going to be very interesting watching not just the systems, but what change they foster, over the next few years.

Apple hands everyone a year to build their mobile money solutions

So, did you see what wasn't announced by Apple? That's right, while the new iPhone (the 4S) comes with a new faster processor, likely more memory, and a rather nifty voice recognition system that leverages the cloud for processing and parsing your questions, it is missing something that many of us were expecting.

NFC.

The lack of near field communications could be down to practical hardware reasons (the late inclusion of a micro-SIM card might have used the physical space and power that NFC would have needed), or that Apple haven't managed to crack a mobile money system that has a beautiful simplicity so it continues to be iterated in private till it "just works".

No matter the reason, everyone in the space has another six months to a year to work on mobile money projects before the iGorilla enters the room. That means Google and the Android handset manufactures can work away with their NFC solution using Google Wallet. Paypal can continue to push their non-hardware specific alternative. That means there's little chance of an alternative technology taking the PR inches out of the London Olympics and the contactless payment trials going ahead.

It doesn't mean that Apple are not going to come into the game, but it does mean that they will be coming into a more mature market, with established rules of thumb and operational procedures. It means that awareness and attempts at other pervasive systems can continue and grow.

And everyone knows they're against the clock to get it right before the iPhone shows its hand.

Telepin Powers Mobile Financial Services in Papua New Guinea

As a provider of mobile money transaction platforms, we get to work in some of the most interesting and remote parts of the world.  One such place is Papua New Guinea (PNG) where we were recently selected to power Digicel Group’s cellmoni mobile money service.  This service includes all the normal things you’d expect, as well as the ability to transfer money to friends and family anywhere in the country.  Also powered by Telepin and hosted on the Digicel network are Post PNG’s MobileSMK and MiCash from Nationwide Microbank.
 
There appears to be great demand by residents of PNG for a system that enhances cash safety, which includes phone transfers and a means to transact, store and accumulate value for later use.    The solutions from Digicel, Post PNG and Nationwide Microbank are delivering a best-in-class solution that extends value to PNG mobile subscribers, merchant networks and ecosystem partners.
 
Telepin’s Cayman Transaction platform is used by all three providers for mobile financial services (MFS) offerings.  The service is regulated by the Central Bank of PNG and has been developed in partnership with Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP) with a view to promoting financial inclusion within PNG and the region.
 
For more details, you can read the press release.

Square and NFC measure up against each other

"I’ve never met a single merchant in the U.S. who says I want this NFC thing."

That's Square's COO, Keith Rabois, speaking to Giga OM. To be fair, he has a vested interest as Square's payment system is built around a traditional magstripe card reader (a technology that will have some troubles leaving the continental US when going it encounters Chip and Pin), and right now, I tend to agree with him.

But at the same time the idea of a debit card was something merchants didn't want. Or credit cards. Payment methods come into vogue and out of fashion on a regular basis, just look at the emotional ties that see the British Banks continue to issue cheques and guarantee cards to some of their clients when they really want to get rid of the whole system and move to a 100% electronic solution.

New ideas are coming along all the time, and there is a certain evolutionary aspect to all of this. The new money transaction methods that survive will be the ones that are strong, be it strong from the idea and implementation, strong thanks to the back-end employed, or strong because of the business relationships they be building on.

The entrance of Google into the payment race, with their NFC Google Wallet available to the public, is sure to draw the attention of the press. Square no longer have Silicon Valley bloggers to themselves, so they're naturally going to come out fighting. But Rabois speech is a strong one, even for that scenario. There's no doubt that Google have deep pocket, and it's likely that Wallet's attractiveness to them is in the coupon and discount space (leveraging advertising, like all their products), than in a profitable payment system, so it's not a level playing field with similar goals.

In the same breath, Square always likes to minimise their investment from Visa.

But all is fair in the valley, and in business. What is certain is that the victor is likely to be the customer. As the payment systems force themselves to be better, faster, and more secure than the others, the benefits to the payee and receivers is only going to improve.

So bring on the battle!