Tag: mobile payments

Oxygen has now launched its smartphone payments app service that provides users a new way to pay and get paid.

Provider of payment solutions, Oxygen, has now announced the launch of its mobile wallet service, called the Oxygen Wallet, which provides users the ability to transfer money and buy gifts for family and friends with whom they are connected over social networks.

This service can also be used for bill payments, refilling cell phone service accounts, and shopping.

According to the chairman and managing director of Oxygen, Pramod Saxena, “Ours is the country’s first social mobile wallet service through which people can share money with their friends and family over their preferred social networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google+, and Twitter.”

It is expected that the top users of this mobile wallet will be youth when they want to split bills with friends.

The service will give these individuals the chance to send smaller but frequent amounts of money or gifts to their friends. When they head to restaurants and they want to split the bill, they can easily transfer their share of the total to the individual who has covered the whole thing.

Saxena explained that they will be able to use the Oxygen Wallet to be able to pay their bills, to make payments on mobile commerce sites such as when purchasing movie tickets, to pay for pizza orders, to make travel ticket bookings, to pay for movie and music downloads, and to pay for their mobile service charges.

He added that “Oxigen now sees the opportunity to leverage the social connect to India’s 900 million mobile users and 100 million Facebook accounts, where the youth is rapidly adopting social media apps like WhatsApp, Twitter etc.”

The mobile wallet apps is now available on both the Google Play Store and on the Apple Store. According to Saxena, it gives users the ability to be able to send funds to their connections through their favorite social media channels without ever having to actually share any of the information about their own bank account or about the accounts of the recipient.

Banks are now vying for a top spot in this marketplace where the potential for growth is astronomical.

The African marketplace is providing a rather unique mobile banking opportunity to financial institutions that are looking into new areas of considerable potential, as the majority of people there have cell phones, but do not have bank accounts.

This provides the opportunity to use mobile technology to bring services to a fresh banking market.

This concept is far from simply being theoretical. Mobile banking is already seeing explosive growth in many countries throughout Africa and now banks are hoping to be able to step into these economies in order to make sure that they don’t miss out on this new revenue stream. At the moment, many of these services are currently dominated by telecom companies, as is the case in Kenya. However, in that country, one of the largest banks in the country – Equity Bank – is entering into the battle in order to reclaim some of the turf that it has traditionally called its own.

Currently, M-Pesa holds the top spot as the most popular mobile banking service in Kenya.

M-Pesa gives an individual in Kenya the ability to use a mobile wallet for receiving payments, sending funds to other users of the service, or even withdrawing cash from agents at roadside stands and convenience stores located throughout the country. The company, itself, is owned by Safaricom, which is a Vodafone Group subsidiary in Kenya.

This service is providing banking services to individuals and business owners who have previously been unbanked. That said, it offers them a range of service that are highly useful to them. For example, it means that their funds can be kept in digital form so that their risk if they are robbed is considerably lower. Furthermore, individuals who live in rural areas but who migrate to the city to work there for weeks or months at a time can send funds back to their families without having to make the physical trip.

The M-Pesa mobile banking service first launched in 2007, and now it is handling an estimated $18 billion in annual transactions. This from individuals ranging from the pedicab drivers in Mombasa to the cattle herders in the distant villages of the Rift Valley, and everybody in between; nearly all of whom have previously been unbanked despite the fact that they make up approximately 43 percent of the economic output of the country.