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Sci Tech
IT TRENDS
Using your mobile to make a payment
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With payment via cell phone call or SMS launched, the era of the wireless wallet has arrived in India
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— Photo: AFP
mobile magic: A Japanese customer pays with her mobile phone at a Coca Cola dispensing machine.
The vending machine in the departure lounge of the airport offers an attractive range of chocolates. The prices are displayed. All you have to do is to slip in the right currency note and your personal favourite among the offerings should pop out. That is how such machines work worldwide.
Present procedure
Here we do things differently: A young lady is seated next to the vending machine. You tell her your selection. She tells you the price.
You give her a currency note. She gives you back the change. Then she slips in a selection of coins from her own collection, collects the chocolate bar as it pops out and hands it over with a smile.
This was until fairly recently the (not so) Automatic Vending Machine or AVM in operation in the domestic terminal of Mumbai’s Chatrapati Shivaji Airport. Even today a major media group operates AVMs selling its publications in many domestic airports and almost always, you will find a smiling sales person waiting to help you with the manual tasks of what was designed to be an automatic process. Are we ‘like this only?’
The time for sharp technological change is long overdue and the mobile phone may make IT happen. The latest figures released by the Telecom Authority of India (TRAI) show the number of Indians who have a mobile phone crossed 200 million in August.
Incredible statistic
This is a such an incredible statistic that service providers have decided that the time is ripe to leapfrog from non automatic vending machines to a new era of the wireless wallet... when Indians can make a variety of payments with a few taps on the keypads of their mobile phones — or a few words of SMS.
And yes, they will be able very soon to wave their mobiles like so many magic wands at auto vending systems to get the soft drinks, chocolates or railway platform tickets of their choice.
Hot application
The name of the new game is Mobile Payment and it is currently one of the hottest new wireless applications being floated.
Earlier this month news leaked out that Google, the Web’s biggest search engine had quietly applied almost 18 months ago for a U.S. patent for a system it called GPay, and described in its application as ‘a computer-implemented method of effectuating an electronic on-line payment.’
It will use text messages to authenticate payments, debit the purchaser’s account and credit the seller’s account. Being Google, this has raised intense speculation about its interest in mobile payment. Could it be the agni asthra or secret weapon to fuel its much anticipated foray into the arena with a GPhone?
Seems likely, but the fact remains that Google will be a relative late comer (if a huge player) into the mobile payments business. At least three India-fuelled international tech solutions companies, hearing details of the Google patent application are likely to say, “join the club!”
They have their own solutions in place and at least two are already fuelling the Indian end of the industry, with a third poised to launch within weeks.
On September 6, mChek, an Indian ingenuity-fuelled player in mobile solutions, headquartered in the Cayman Islands, announced that its secure and on-demand mobile payments platform, would be used by the nation’s largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel to launch an ‘anytime anywhere’ bill payment facility.
It will allow an Airtel customer with any make of hand phone (who is also a Visa credit card holder) to pay the mobile phone bill using a simple SMS and to receive instant acknowledgement.
In the near future
mChek is known to have already signed up with State Bank of India and ICICI Bank and their customers can expect to be offered similar services in the near future.
In Sri Lanka, mChek has partnered with the island’s largest mobile operator Dialog and the NDB Bank for a similar service involving bill payments, prepaid card top ups, and over the counter purchases.
There is a small difference from the Indian offering. In Sri Lanka, the SIM card of the phone must be exchanged, free, for a special SIM with some software embedded.
A few days earlier, Mumbai International Airports Pvt Ltd, signed up with the Bangalore-based Moveo Systems to deploy the latter’s mobile solutions for m-ticketing and mcheck-in — features that will become necessary to handle the expected doubling in passenger traffic from this year’s 20 million.
Earlier this year, another mobile payments technology created by Indians — PayMate — was launched for Citibank customers and credit card holders — as well as by over 2000 online selling sites and dozens of physical establishments like restaurants and shops.
You could make Internet service payments to VSNL or to Mumbai’s Gold Cab taxis using your PayMate-fuelled mobile. By year end, another Indian player — the Ahmedabad based E Cube Solutions, is due to launch its mobile phone-based payments solution, V-Cash as well as a Mobile Operated Vending Machine of MOVM, that can be messaged using an SMS.
Larger canvas
In all this, Indian technology players are addressing a larger canvas, beyond the undoubtedly attractive domestic market.
mChek says it is the first mobile payments solution that complies with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards... opening up possibilities for a lucrative tie-up with other PCI/DSS compliant suppliers. Kids in Tokyo and Seoul, routinely wave their hand phones at CokeMobiles and other beverage dispensers, just as American subscribers of Verizon are just learning to do.
But the technologies that drive them may vary from market to market. Some services require a special chip in the phone — more often a souped up SIM. Others, like most of the Indian offerings, tie up with external agencies to provide the transaction integrity.
Such systems cannot at present enable the payment to be debited to the top up balance of the phone but have to depend on an agency like a credit card company. Which will emerge from the shakeout?
No one knows what the customer will find most compelling. So the industry is lining up multiple variants of the electronic wireless wallet in the shop window and saying
“Take your pick. Tell us which is the coolest of all”. It is a cyber swayamwaram and the choosy bride will go for only what is best and brightest among the suitors lined up by the M-commerce industry.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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