At the the Under The Radar conference near San Francisco today, there have been some really great mobile finance start-ups pitching to the crowd. For those who love mobile payments and m-commerce as much as I do, you’ll be interested in hearing the cheap, international money transfer service being launched by m-Via. There was a panel of expert judges on hand to grill m-Via CEO Bill Baryhar as he pitched the service, and I’ve included some of their pertinent questions here.
m-Via is a brand new company, which is only now beginning to roll out. It specialises in letting immigrant workers send money back to family in their home countries – and is particularly geared towards unbanked customers. The service is based entirely on SMS.
The example Bill gave was a Mexican who works in America for most of the year, sending money home to support his wife in Mexico. If there’s an emergency at home and he needs to send 25 bucks to his wife, traditional remittance service will cost him 20 dollars. Bill through some real heartstring-plucking stories in about how hard it is for the wife to head into town and pick up cash from banks – with 90 minute bus rides and gangs of roving thieves.
So how does m-Via help these people? It does cross border mobile transfer via SMS. Once you’ve registered for m-Via, all you need is your targets mobile phone number and you can send them cash. If you do send somebody money, m-Via automatically generates a mobile account connected to that number which stores that money. The recipient doesn’t have to do a thing – they just get an SMS informing them that they now have some money waiting for them in a mobile account! For workers who need to send small amounts of money home very regularly, the service only asks for a single monthly subscription payment. Once you’ve paid that monthly fee, you can send as many payments per month as you want.
Once you’ve sent money to a number, they can get it out at one of two locations: a retailer or an ATM. In both cases, it needs to be have m-Via elements installed. All the recipient needs is the code that comes with a remittance – they can enter that code into an ATM or retailer device and withdraw the case. At no point do they need a plastic card – just the code.
Judge question: What happens if someone loses their phone?
The money is still stored in your m-Via account. You have both a phone number and PIN to access that account. You can use the PIN to change the mobile number, just like letting the bank know you’ve changed address.
Judge question: how does the ATM model work?
Once youve gotten your “CASH OUT” code from m-Via, you take it to an ATM and press the m-VIA button. At the moment only independent ATM providers are accepting m-Via technology, but the larger banks are interested and are watching to see how that turns out. The real money is in point-of-sale retailers, where m-Via has seen more than 50% penetration.
What we think?
There really isn’t anything new to this service, on a technical level. Mobile remittance services have been using a combination of SMS and retailer reader to move cash for years now. The refreshing part about this service is that it is designed from the outset to work internationally. And if Bill is to be believed then the red hot sales team at m-Via have gotten deals in place 50% of the retailers in Mexico. If true, that’s huge!
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