The Indian Postal Department has brought a very old and popular way of money transfer - According to the launch, this service would help people who were unable to avail bank services from mobile phone.
The service would work like this:
- Sender goes to post office, gives details like mobile number, amount and address of both the sender and the recipient.
- On depositing the cash, PO sends a unique code to sender and recipient via SMS
- The recipient goes to nearest PO and shows the unique code and gets the money.
Like traditional Money Orders a 5% charge would be levied by the Postal Department on the transaction although it is possible that this charge would be reduced in the future. The service is being launched with the help of BSNL but would be open to subscribers on all networks. In the past a lot of companies have worked on mobile payment. Some of these require high end smartphones with advanced technologies while some work on a simple mechanism like SMS. The MMOS falls in the latter category and doesn’t require any sort of substantial investment from the user.
800 million people in India have mobile phones which enable them to transfer money quick, without hassles through MMOS. Maybe the upcoming UID project can be somehow integrated into MMOS to offer better security, its a bright future ahead! Initially, the service would be available in Bihar and Punjab, and would be rolled out throughout the country in the next eight weeks.
