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Bharti To Introduce Mobile Payments
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Bharti Airtel one of India’s leading telecom operators is planning to roll out mobile payment services for its 50million plus users.
This service will allow users to make payments using their cell phones. As Bharti is also getting in Wal-Mart in India it makes perfect sense for them to provide the mobile payment facility. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mobile payment system would function only with Wal-Mart stores.
The one problem I fell which could really hamper Bharti mobile payment service is “These handsets could be Bluetooth-enabled, and will act as front-end,” if (and i mean if) this means that Bluetooth has anything to do with the payment mechanism then I really doubt the success of this service as Bluetooth is pretty vulnerable and can be hacked easily.
There are existing mobile payment solution providers, Paymate and M-check being a few of them. Paymate and M-check links the users financial instrument (MasterCard/Visa credit cards) and allws users to make payments thru messaging.
Balaji Jagannathan, MD, Sybase, says: “In an emerging market like India, mPayment is expected to become a major factor in commerce since alternatives cost more and are less convenient.”
Companies like Sybase who allow natural language texting on mobile phones for users to check bank balances, enquiry etc, I see payments also taking such a route. For e.g. while paying Shoppers Stop have a short code like Pay ‘SS’ and the amt
A country which boasts of the 2nd highest mobile user base, India is certainly the place to be for payment providers and is obviously one of the next drivers of the mobile market.
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I think payments will probably be via SMS. I doubt bluetooth would have anything to do with it!
SMS as a payment tool makes payments accessible from anywhere and ideally thats what Bharti would want because that would want because that would mean more revenue. Im sure there will be special Airtel tie ups with Wal Mart as you correctly pointed out - i doubt it will be in the field of Mobile payments though.
Remember SMS Pujas?
if i m not wrong, mcheck is Airtel only solution
Why would m commerce surprise anyone? M banking has already made in roads in India, with all major banks offering M banking facilities. Even few co-operatives have started offering this facility.
Since last 1 year i have been paying my reliance bills through my phone (R world).
I dont think technologies like m coupon and m commerce would be developed on bluetooth tech. As rightly mentioned it is very vulnerable. It definitely has to be GPRS or SMS based.
@Harshil - i hope that bluetooth isnt the payment medium.. and yes i do remember the SMS Pooja bit. i am pretty confident about the Walmart - mobile Payment method as i feel its teh perfect way to leverage and integrate their services. they can have somehthing like a Airtel world where users would be able to make payments and and purchases from their cell phone.
@dina - The official M-check websites has airtel as one one of their clients so one can assume that mcheck is the payment solution provider for Airtel.
@anand - the surprise was meant for Airtel tying up with Walmart which is one of bhartis ventures in india. unless GPRS costs come down i doubt that the services will really pick up. sms makes perfect sense universally