Payments in India

Yesterday, my parents returned from their first ever trip to India. Apart from the beautiful pictures of temples and the Taj Mahal, I noticed another thing in the pictures. Even the worst slum had advertisements of Nokia, Samsung and Vodafone. These people live in modest houses (to put it mildly) and drive home made trucks and rikshas. They earn a couple of hunderd rupees a day. Do you think they own a bank account? They do however own a mobile phone.

"There's such a big gap in the world -- there are 4 billion cellphones and only 1 billion bank accounts," Carol Realini (founder of OboPay) says. Obopay's service, already live in the US and India, lets people with cellphones pay each other through text messages. The funds can come out of bank accounts or credit cards. People who lack bank accounts can prepay funds into an Obopay account. For 25 cents, anyone with a cellphone in the US can also send up to $1,000 a week to anyone in India with a cellphone. And there are many more initiatives like this in India.

Clearly, mobile payments offer a wider way to reach people without bank accounts in places like India and China. The payoff could be huge. People who are now "unbanked" in China, India and Brazil alone could generate $85 billion in banking revenue by 2015, estimates the Boston Consulting Group. India, like many emerging market countries today, is in the center of mobile phone explosion in growth. India has about 200 million mobile subscribers and is adding 5 million a month.

And it is a form of humanitarian aid. Getting these people access to a 'bank' account allows them to start saving. Mobile payments will provide access to financial services, including cross-border remittances, money transfer, payments, savings and credit accounts. By empowering them with mobile technology , mobile payments is bringing the full power of banking to those who need it most.

Mobile Payments Failures

Recently, Jan Ondrus (assistant professor at ESSEC Business School) conducted an interesting research on the reasons of failure for mobile payments in Switzerland. Interesting, because he categorizes his findings into the different phases of a mobile payment project. The full article is available here. He investigated several mobile payment projects and below a quick recap of the different failure reasons:

Phase 1 - Build an alliance between MNO and Financial institutions.
This seems reasonable, although it is easier said then done. How many MNO's are capable of doing this? We know Vodafone is already active in this market via MPesa, so thats one down. To me it seems absolutely crucial for banks to connect to an MNO as soon as possible.

Phase 2 - Involve the sellers and business intermediaries side (i.e., merchants) in the development and deployment of the service. Build a sufficient supply in two-sided markets.
Again quite obvious. No one will use mobile payments if they can't actually pay for stuff with the service.

Phase 3 - Provide an adequate value for the consumers to join the service. Generate incentives to create demand in two-sided markets.
If it's more expensive and more hassle, no consumer will make the switch from cash. Easier, faster, better security, more functionality and cheaper...

Phase 4 - Involve the manufacturers to scale the system and offer interoperability and ease of use. Build up interoperable standards for connectivity and transactions.
Interoperability is key, both for the consumer and the merchant. It will not catch on if you have to have accounts at several different mobile payment operators to be be able to split the restaurant bill.