MChek India, meanwhile, is looking a broader reach for its offerings. It plans to launch payment solutions for common-day uses such as paying auto or taxi fares through mobile phones. The application can transfer small amounts from one bank account to another via the mobile phone.
“Auto and taxi drivers could never take electronic payment, so it will bring a complete breakthrough,” says Sanjay Swamy, chief executive of mChek, which provides such facilities for retailers in Sri Lanka and has done trial runs for the service with taxi drivers in India. The service is expected to launch later this year.
Another Bangalore mobile content service provider, OnMobile Global Ltd, which concluded an initial share sale recently, plans to offer customers the option of topping up prepaid accounts of a limited number of people. “We have worked with a couple of banks; we are going to launch this with one or two operators in three to six months,” says a spokesperson of OnMobile, a spin-off from software giant Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Technology researcher Gar-tner India Research and Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd has not done a formal survey, but reckons the market for such services to be less than $16 million, or 1%, of the data services market. Indian wireless phone firms are estimated to have made some $1.6 billion from text messaging, downloading of ringtones, wall papers and other non-voice offerings.
“The initial push for mobile commerce is expected to come from banking services,” says Neha Gupta, senior research analyst, Gartner India. “Later, point-of-purchase sales would push the market.”
A recent report by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor—a consortium of 33 public and private funding organizations to expand the access the poor have to financial services—cites successes in other countries, such as Kenya and the Philippines.
Banks in India have already started tapping this market with ICICI Bank Ltd, the country’s largest private lender, making all of its Internet banking service available on mobile phones from early January.
“For the first two-three months we are looking for 30,000-50,000 customers; then we will scale it up,” says Manindra Juneja, head of mobile commerce business at ICICI Bank. “Because of the convenience and the way the mobile network is spread across the country, it will quickly gather the speed,” he added.
Standard Chartered Bank recently launched a service that allows a customer to transfer money across the country from an ATM to anyone with a mobile phone. The recipient can withdraw the money from any of the bank’s ATMs using a pin number which is automatically messaged to his mobile phone, and the order number that the sender should communicate to the recipient.
There are more than 220 million wireless subscribers in India—a market that adds more than six million customers every month.
Bharti Telesoft Ltd, a software products and solutions provider to mobile operators and a subsidiary of Bharti Enterprises Ltd, which controls India’s largest mobile phone services firm, Bharti Airtel Ltd, is working on providing solutions for microfinance operations, especially in data collection work.