Denny |
December 11, 2013
The country has a very large domestic migrant worker population that are generally unbanked.
According to the latest analyses regarding the India mobile payments industry, the technology is experiencing a massive growth among some of the poorest people in the country, including the considerable domestic migrant worker group that are unbanked but that still need to be able to send the money that they earn back to their families in their villages.
It is estimated that, in total, this group sends about $12 billion in funds from their city jobs back to their villages.
Many of these workers travel thousands of miles away from their home villages in search of places where they will be given employment so that they can earn enough to send some back to their families. Using traditional means, this requires them to go to the bank, complete a form, and wait in line. This is a process that can take an hour or more. As bank hours are the same as most work hours, it causes them to lose an hour of pay or more. However, with the new India mobile payments opportunities, they can skip that step.
A growing number of poor citizens of the country are investigating the India mobile payments options.
Among the most popular services in the country is a startup called MoneyOnMobile that allow funds to be sent from the worker’s cell phone to the one owned by his family back in his home village. The idea itself started in Kenya, six years ago, as M-Pesa – for a similar reason – and is now starting to take off in the form of new services in India and other nations. It is allowing poorer people in Kenya and other countries to be able to send money, pay medical bills, purchase groceries, fund school tuition, or buy food at a restaurant, for example, wirelessly with their cell phones.
The M-Pesa service is currently processing around $21 billion in wireless funds every year. Now it has inspired nearly 200 comparable efforts in other nations, like this recent India mobile payments startup – particularly in areas such as Africa and South Asia, where the populations of people under the poverty line are quite large.
The last few weeks are proving to be a defining period for this type of transaction.
Over the last few weeks, the combination of the groundbreaking mobile payments announcements made from Money2020 in Las Vegas and from the GSMA’s NFC & Mobile Money Summit in New York have allowed a much clearer vision of the future of this technology to be formed.
The leaders of the industry giants are now revealing the next steps that their companies will take.
This has given the world the opportunity to see a much clearer vision of the future of mobile payments technology, with increasingly pervasive tech as well as a considerable cooperation from the industry. As was pointed out by the co-founder and CEO of Ensygnia (a visual pay technology), Richard H Harris, m-commerce venders and retailers alike will now be working to give consumers a better shopping experience overall.
This includes the development of mobile payments for everything from smartphones to wearable gadgets.
It also involves the creation of new ways for people to order their products and services and to employ mobile payments through the establishment of identity and by “tokenizing the things we use for identity,” said Harris.
The Visa global head of digital for developed markets, Sam Shrauger, explained that he sees the tech within the retail environment becoming more omnipresent. He stated that by being able to work together, it will become possible to establish a “strong ecosystem” that will be both secure and safe because it gives consumers the opportunity to – for instance – walk into a restaurant and have their meal already prepared and sitting on the table for them. He explained that mobile payments and commerce are “all about taking friction out of every aspect of the shopping, buying, paying, post-transaction experience.”
The Groupon owned Breadcrumb restaurant point of sale system founder, Seth Harris, agreed with Shrauger’s statement that cooperation of this nature will broaden, as companies are well aware of how difficult it is to progress in this way when they are attempting to do so on their own. “I think we’re going to see a lot more cooperation among a lot of the big companies than people really realise. It’s only through us all working together that I think we’re going to get there fast.”
PayPal’s vice president of global solutions management, Carey Kolaja, pointed out that there has already been notable progress in mobile payments and loyalty systems over the last year and a half; that more distance has been travelled in that time than it has in the last decade.
