MMPL's Mobile Wallet: Buy and Sell goods & services using just a mobile phone

Wednesday November 23, 2011 , 3 min Read

My Mobile Payments receives RBI’s approval to issue Mobile Wallet — And you thought paying by your credit card was the smart way to go! Come December, you can use virtual money to pay for the goods and services you buy, right from paying your local storekeeper to recharging your DTH connection. And the man behind this revolutionary technology is entrepreneur Shashank Joshi. MD of My Mobile Payments Ltd (MMPL), a Mumbai-based mobile payment service provider, MMPL is a mobile payment systems provider that offers pre-paid and electronic payment instruments to mobile phone subscribers for purchasing goods and services and for merchants to electronically accept payments and facilitate their movement of funds. “To avail the service, all you need is an operational mobile phone and network. It is that simple,” says Joshi.

Joshi brings to MMPL over 18 years of professional experience in IT and ITES, outsourcing, transition and management consulting industries. A mechanical engineer from MIT, Joshi spent his early career years shuttling between US andIndia. “While visitingIndia, the whole process of paying my bills was arduous. It then struck me that people need a service that will help them do these regular chores easily,” adds Joshi. And more than the internet, it was mobile as a technology that appealed to him. He explains that paying bills or buying tickets online still requires internet services. “Whereas mobile phone penetration inIndiais far more than the internet.Indiais one of the fastest growing markets in the world when it comes to mobiles, which is why Money onMobile(MoM) uses this technology to reach out to people,” remarks Joshi.

MoM offers mobile phone users the flexibility and convenience to top up their talk time, DTH account, buy air, bus, movie tickets etc anytime, anywhere and with any type of payment type. Their service operates independently of the mobile phone carrier and hence any mobile subscriber can avail of MoM’s service. This offers mobile carriers the unique opportunity to augment their per mobile client revenue stream. MoM provides merchants the ability to accept payments via a mobile environment reducing payment time at a lower cost per transaction. Merchants who currently do not accept electronic form of payments can save a huge cost as they do not require a POS terminal to acceptMobilepayments.

Shshank Joshi, Managing Director, My Mobile Payments Limited

It has been just one year since MMPL was established and Joshi started building on his network. Today, he has connected with 36,000 retail outlets acrossIndiaand MMPL’s daily sales volume amounts to Rs 1 crore. “Through MoM, we plan to primarily target all non-card consumers (those who do not have debit or credit cards). Also, since the humble mobile phone is a ubiquitous device, using it to pay for services becomes convenient and easy,” says Joshi and adds, “I am not worried about people being averse to the technology. In the same way that credit and debit cards empowered as consumers, MoM will empower people from smaller town and cities too who do not use plastic for monetary transactions.”He further explains that either even if you do not have the MoM application stored on your mobile you can still use an SMS to transfer money to the retailer and buy the product at any of their registered stores from the network. The service recently got a nod from the RBI MMPL is determined to turn RBI’s desire into reality of converting 70 per cent of the country’s financial transactions to electronic by 2012.

Joshi has heralded a technology that will for sure affect our buying behaviour and might just change the way we buy products and services.

For more details, check out their website - http://www.money-on-mobile.net/

- Anisha Mehta

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