Tag: india mobile payments

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 joint venture between Monitise and Visa has started a strategic deal with the Indian bank.

A new mobile commerce and smartphone payments partnership has now been announced between ICICI Bank from India, and the Visa and Monitise 50/50 joint venture in the country called Movida.

The largest private sector bank and the joint venture signed the agreement for smartphone friendly offerings.

Through this new partnership, ICICI bank intends to make new mobile commerce and payments offerings in a deal that has been compared to the one that occurred in 2012 between the same platform, Movida, and HDFC Bank, the second largest one in India’s private sector.

This will give ICICI’s customers the chance to take advantage of some of the potential of mobile commerce.

Some of the mobile commerce offerings that the Movida platform will provide to ICICI customers include the ability to pay their bills, purchase movie tickets, and recharge their prepaid wireless accounts from their smartphones at any time, no matter where they are.

The Movida platform can be accessed through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology that is currently available in a number of different language (which is important considering the diversity in languages in India) or through the menu-based Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) GSM mobile protocol technology. The hope is that by providing these different mobile commerce options for access, it will help to maximize the number of consumers who will have the appropriate smartphone technology to use it.

ICICI Bank plans to roll out its new mobile commerce options later on in this quarter. It will be available to its payment card holders and will function across all of the different wireless networks through any payment credit card, including Visa, MasterCard, and a range of others.

In order to use the new mobile commerce feature, cardholders will need to link their card of choice to their smartphone number, which has been registered with ICICI Bank. They will then be able to make a payment through Movida’s secured connection. The card data is secured through the use of a unique, customer selected PIN which will be entered at each use.