Mobile Payment India 2010

Mobile Payment India 2010 was held in Mumbai on Friday, June 4th 2010. The central theme of the conference was for various stakeholders to discuss strategies and challenges for implementing solutions for the new way of digital financial transaction thru mobile phones.

Following are the excerpts of the talk given by some speakers who shared their thoughts on new and emerging technologies.

Inaugral Session: Successful Strategies to increase m-payment penetration in India

 

Kunal Pandey, Director of BFSI practice, KPMG:

• In the current era of convergence there are several people in India without bank accounts. It’s a golden opportunity for stakeholders: regulator, banks and operators to leverage on the unmet need and provide banking and payment services on mobile phones.
  
• The challenges in implementing such solutions will be having regulatory framework, presence of multiple stakeholders and ensuring platform interoperability.
  
• Security will be a key challenge for adoption in brick and mortar world since a mobile phone is the most active device.
  
• Some real world implementations at present are PayBox in EU, M-PESA in Kenya. Creating awareness among end-users should be the highest priority for such kind of solutions in other markets.

Rajaneesh Khare, Head-Remote Banking and CTB, Standard Chartered Bank

• Today mobile phone is a multipurpose terminal. Embedding functionalities of credit and debit cards will definitely have a demand especially among ‘early adopter’.
  
• For mass market adoption language can be a major barrier. Typically such users have high learning curve and seamless adoption is tough to achieve.
  
• The basic strategy for transition from early adoption phase to mass market adoption will be to standardize and simplify.
  
• Stakeholders for success of the technology
  • Customer, Bank, Telcos
    
  • 3rd party software vendors.
    
  • Regulatory bodies
  
  
  
• Stakeholders have to create demand by leveraging on innovations, service differentiation and increase in value of time. Also we need to leverage on the fact that mobile is second most looked after screen.
  
• The major need for mobile payment solution will be for typical merchants who are in need for secured and low-cost solutions.

 

Venkat Ramu – Asst VP, Axis Bank

• We should achieve ground level convergence.
  
• Selling ‘bank accounts’ – a push product and ‘mobiles’ – a pull product together will be a major challenge.

 

Alok Goel, Head – Search & Mobile Product India, Google India

• At present, there’s no real strategy on ground.
  
• We need to redefine Mobile Commerce. Having services such as Health Monitoring System is desirable and people will be ready to pay premium.
  
• Typical number of app in an iPhone is 37 which make life productive only for tech savvy users. For Mobile payment solution to be adopted in mass market, it should be insanely simple.
  
• We need to think about tomorrow. SMS based solutions will be obsolete within 2-3 years
  
• There’s a need for stable and reliable data network for the payment solution to work.
  
• IVR solutions provide linguistic flexibility. But human touch is very critical, for a normal human it’s very tough to talk to IVR.
  
• A desirable solution: A person working in Delhi should be able to seamlessly transfer part of monthly income to parents living in his hometown in Bihar/Jharkhand. Trust is very important for adoption of such solutions which is present provided only by Money-Order service of Postal department.

 

Session-1: Drivers for the growth of M-payment in India

 

Deepak Chandnani, President, Obopay Inc.

• Obopay is a company specialized in mobile payment systems.
  
• They have introduced mobile payment on trial basis in Pune (in collaboration with Nokia and YES bank). The solution acts as an alternative to Mastercard/VISA and Paypal.
  
• In India, there’s a big gap between the number of people having a mobile connection and number of people having bank accounts.
  
• Adoption has to be driven thru collaboration and one typical tangible ‘use-case’ steers the adoption in mass market.
  
• KYC i.e Know-your-customer is very important requirement for implementation of mobile payments solutions. In India, yet-to-implemented UID can meet the requirement.

 

Pascal Di Girolamo BDM-Telecom at Gemalto

• Gemalto is a French digital security company, providing secure personal devices such as smart cards and tokens in addition to software applications and managed services.
  
• In the talk, Pascal discussed about various initiatives taken by his company in challenging markets.
  
• The company has been a pioneer in deploying mobile payment solution in emerging markets of Africa, Latin America and South East Asia.
  
• The Key Success Factor(KSFs) are:
  • Regulator,
    
  • Bank Partnership,
    
  • Technology,
    
  • Offer-Pricing,
    
  • Distribution Network and Advertising.
  
  
  
• Regulator, ISO/TC 68 (technical committee for developing and maintaining international standards covering the areas of banking, securities, and other financial services) role is will be very crucial for global adoption of mobile payment solutions. In India, the role of MPFI(Mobile Payment Forum of India) is also crucial.

 

Sajith Kumar, Head at CanvasM

• India is cash country, 96% of all transactions are thru cash.
  
• The major application of mobile payment will be retail point-of-sale where there’s lot of time overhead due to cash transactions.
  
• A NFC(Near Field Communication) driven system is suitable for Indian needs.

 

Sandeep Ranjan, Head-Mobile Banking, Standard Chartered Bank

• Business Drivers:
• Sustainable business model,
  
• Segment based approach,
  
• Innovation Product, Process and Technology.



• Three requirements w.r.t Regulation
• UID as KYC
  
• KYC should be interoperable
  
• Need for single settlement body, at present there are more than one retail settlement body.

 

Session-2: Future Landscape Ecosystem of M-payment for all stakeholders perspective

 

Rakesh Tumhane, MTNL

• In Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries due to lack of physical security mobile payment has got lot of adoption.
  
• Key challenges: Achieving channel migration and technology abstraction.

 

Nikhil Parulkar, Head-Fraud Risk & Advisory, Mahindra Special Group Services

• Discussed about Risk parameter in mobile banking.
  
• The major threat is Ignorance. There are several loop holes in the system.
  
• The stakeholders need to equipment up-to-date discourse analysis tools to find out suspicious activity on a regular basis.
  
• In spite of comprehensive guideline human behavior cannot be regulated.

 

Dr. Girija Narlikar, Member of Technical Staff, Bell Labs Research

• She introduced a new platform developed by her team Money Bee, a Mobile Crowd-Sourcing solution.
  
• It connects task-givers and task-doers. And with the work done, doers are rewarded with mobile talk time.
  
• Typical tasks can be Market Survey, Mobile Application testing (having a pool of owners of 100 different phones).
  
• In the proposed business model the revenue share will 50% to operators, 25% task doers and 25% to Money Bee solution provider.
  
• The major hurdle is that there’s no standard on operator side for financial transactions.