Rapid Rise In Mobile Money Transactions

[george]

Rapid rise in mobile money transactions

BANGKOK: -- Along with the increase in mobile phones, mobile payment systems in Thailand have been increasing dramatically, giving Thai people new and convenient payment methods, rather than having to visit business counters and use banknotes and coins.

Major mobile-phone operators are currently increasing their payment services to prompt users to pay for products and services via their phones.

True Money, an electronic-payment provider under True Corporation, plans to officially launch a new kind of mobile-payment service called Touch SIM, after year-long trials involving 20,000 selected users.

General manager Piyachart Ratanaprasartporn said that True Money had also provided a mobile-payment service called electronic wallet (e-Wallet) for more than three years.

"Both services [Touch SIM and e-Wallet] are for mobile payments, but e-Wallet offers online payments and is suitable for larger amounts, while Touch SIM is an offline payment that suits smaller amounts of up to Bt200 per transaction. World trends in mobile payment favour these two kinds of services, so we are offering our customers both," Piyachart said.

To use the new Touch SIM service, users will need to buy a Touch SIM card at a cost of Bt149. The card can store up to Bt30,000 and can be refilled when the reserve gets low. Users can pay for products and services by tapping their mobile phones into Touch SIM readers - devices that are being installed in their thousands around Bangkok and the rest of the country. There are currently around 7,000 Touch SIM points and True Money is aiming for 10,000 by the end of this year.

"Next year, we will increase the number of Touch SIM accept points to 50,000, including 10,000 points in 7-Eleven [convenience stores]. We aim to attract around 200,000 mobile phone users to adopt Touch SIM," Piyachart said.

He said True Money currently had around 5.6 million e-Wallet users, or nearly half of True Move's 14 million subscribers. It plans to increase the number of e-Wallet users to 7 million by the end of this year.

Currently, about 30 or 40 business partners accept payments via e-Wallet.

"The status of mobile payments in Thailand is at an early stage. There is a lot of room for growth for all providers. These are quite new services and Thais might be reluctant to use services that are very challenging. However, the benefits we offer will convince them to try and use mobile payments more and more over the next couple of years," Piyachart said.

Recently, Advanced mPAY, an Advanced Info Service (AIS) electronic-payment provider, has linked up with e-marketplace provider Tarad.com, and has extended its service to offer online payments for products and services purchased from online merchants at Tarad.com.

Advanced mPAY's managing director Supreecha Limpikanjanakowit said collaboration between mPAY and Tarad.com was aimed at rapidly increasing the number of mPAY's merchant accounts from 200 at present to 30,000 by the end of this year.

The company hopes to attract around 20 per cent of all 150,000 online merchants trading at Tarad.com, to adopt mPAY as a payment channel.

"To promote mPAY's service in the online community, we are offering services free of transaction charges; without fees for every payment, from now until the end of this year. Next year, online merchants will be charged Bt5 per transaction," Supreecha said.

He said that with 30,000 online merchants, mPAY hoped to attract about 150,000 end-user or buyer accounts. Added to its existing 500,000 accounts, this will mean mPAY will have about 700,000 accounts by the end of this year.

"When compared to the total number of AIS mobile phone users - more than 20 million people - there is huge room for Advanced mPAY to turn them into mPAY accounts," Supreecha said.

The company plans to expand mPAY's payment services to cover four major business lines: card refill, e-commerce, money transfers and m-biz solutions.

"During the first half of this year, customers' use of mPAY services increased by 30 per cent over last year, with more than 3.3 million financial transactions being made per month," Supreecha said.

Currently, it has about 65,000 active accounts that generate transactions valued at Bt400 million per month. Eighty per cent of the total transaction value is for GSM bill and One-2-Call top-up payments. The rest are payments for the services of mPAY's business partners such as AsiaSoft.

"The overall mobile-payment market has shown continuous double-digit growth for a few years. For mPAY - because we have been expanding the coverage of our payment network and services - we have enjoyed growth of 30 to 40 per cent per year over the past two years," he said.

Revenue comes mainly come from transaction fees, and this year mPAY is aiming for revenue between Bt150 million and Bt200 million.

Meanwhile, DTAC is also providing mobile-payment services through its ATM SIM, in partnership with Kasikornbank.

The head of DTAC's Value Added Service Division, Pakorn Pannachet, said his company's mobile-payment service was different from those of competitors because DTAC did not offer the payment service itself. Rather, it was offered through KBank.

"However, we identify ATM SIM as our mobile payment service with the aim of offering our users more convenient choices of secure payments," he said.

After being launched last year, ATM SIM has attracted about 1.1 million subscribers. The company plans to raise this to 1.3 million subscribers by the end of this year, with growth of 40 to 50 per cent over last year, when there was only 700,000 to 800,000 users, he said.

"The aim of ATM SIM is not to generate revenue from financial transaction fees, but to generate more revenue for DTAC airtime because to benefit from ATM SIM, users have to first have a DTAC number. About 50 per cent of the 1.1-million ATM SIM subscribers were originally DTAC users. That means the ATM SIM service effectively helps us to recruit new DTAC subscribers," Pakorn said.

Using ATM SIM, subscribers can check their bank account status, transfer money, receive financial transaction alerts and make payments.

About 10 to 20 per cent of ATM SIM transactions, or around 300,000 to 500,000 per month, involve payments and electronic money transfers. These are normally conducted by 300,000 to 400,000 active users.

"Most transactions involve payments for DTAC's postpaid bills and prepaid money refills. We plan to increase the number of transactions involving payments for third parties. This will mean increasing the number of partners who are willing to accept payments via ATM SIM, especially partners who have monthly bills that will help us to drive more payment transactions. We recently partnered with Aeon and KTC to allow their customers to pay bills with ATM SIM. We now have between 50 and 60 such partners," Pakorn said.

-- The Nation 2009-08-04

[garyh]

Big brother would be pleased as it is a step closer to a cashless society which means less tax avoidance

[jackdanielsesq]

Whilst convenient - it has also become a new avenue to rob more people of more money - especially developing countries.

BR>Jack