Tag: mobile payments startup

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 business will be a rival, and was just opened under the name Affirm.

Co-founder of PayPal, Max Levchin, has just announced the launch of a business that will be a direct rival to the mobile payments segment of the company, which will be called Affirm.

This new company will add itself to the rapidly growing and highly competitive smartphone based marketplace.

The technology that is being offered through Affirm is meant to assist shoppers in completing mobile payments more quickly and easily when making purchases online by way of their devices such as smartphones and tablets, says the official website of the company. At the moment, eBay’s PayPal is the online payment leader, but it is facing growing competition from startups that are making their way into the mcommerce space.

Affirm is concentrating on streamlining mobile payments for a far faster checkout process.

The goal of the company is to help to decrease the amount of information that needs to be typed in when making a purchase over a small device such as a smartphone. Entering credit card numbers, shipping addresses, and other data can be time consuming and frustrating when using a very small screen or a touchscreen typing pad.

Affirm has claimed to have reduced the process of making a purchase online so that it involves two simply taps on the screen of a smartphone. The first is to actually choose Affirm on the website of the participating merchant, and the second is to actually confirm the order itself. At the moment, the identity of the user is confirmed through Facebook. Therefore, there will be a third step that must be taken for first time users, which involves having to log in to their Facebook accounts and then giving permission to use the Affirm app.

Levchin was one of PayPal’s two cofounders (Peter Thiel being the other), and held the position of Chief Technology Officer for four years. After that point, the online and mobile payments company was acquired by eBay. It was Levchin who created and constructed the unique and state of the art fraud prevention and online security systems for PayPal.