Obopay to bring ATMs to mobile phones

NEW DELHI, INDIA: US-based Obopay, a peer-to-peer and remittance service provider, aims at extending ATM to the mobile phone.

As a first step, the company will be launching its full-fledged service for the Indian market along with six major banks and three telecom operators.

“The number of mobile phones in the country far exceeds the Internet connections and same is the case with the bank accounts. Moreover, 80 million people are working outside their hometown in India, and they tend to transfer money, in an expensive way. We want to leverage on the reach and distribution of mobiles in India by offering an effective way of using the mobile phone as the ATM,” Aditya D Menon, executive director, Obopay India, told CyberMedia News here.

He said that the company had tied-up with independent service providers who cater to shared networked ATMs of about 60 banks to make the process of remittance and payments easier.

“Obopay applications are non-proprietary and interoperable, thus removing the barrier for m-payments and m-commerce to happen. We will also launch two applications – one for the high-end mobile phones and another is for the basic phones, for both the GSM and CDMA technologies. A WAP version is also available,” he informed.

In a bid to lower the transaction cost involved and also extend the reach of the service, Obopay is in the process of tying-up with other stakeholders such as bill pay vendors, SMS aggregators.

“We want to compete with the predominant cash market and have it turned into electronic transactions,” he said. “We are also working on launching the applications in seven Indian vernacular languages starting with Hindi in March, followed by text-to-speech recognition by end of the year,” Menon added.

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