Roamware is one of those big companies you don’t hear about all that often. It handles mobile roaming for 418 operators around the world, in over 150 countries. I had a great chat with Abraham Punnoose, VP of Marketing & Business Development, yesterday and discovered that one of the things we were both very interested in was mobile payments and transactions – and it turns out that Roamware is extremely active in that arena.
First, a little backgound:
Roamware is based in Californa, and has been doing business for 9 years now. The company is primarily interested in roaming solutions for operators – that’s where 95% of its revenue comes from. But a significant amount of Roamware investment is being up into mobile financial services, as it predicts that there will be a lot of revenue in this area in the future.
Roamware is working on fixing the interoperability issues between operators for mobile finance. The main area where this would be applied is in money transfer. The example Abraham used was a Mexican immigrant in the US, sending money to his family. This isn’t a new idea by any means – there are quite a number of companies working on international remittance. But not many of those companies are huge roaming providers like Roamware! It feels that operators should be properly set up to do this – then all that worker would need to do is walk into any operator branch (AT&T, Verizon, whoever) and give them the mobile number of the person he wants to send money to.
Roamware is aiming at enabling operators to do this – it’s not looking to set up its own money service. It wants the operators to be able to the job, and do it well. The first step, which Roamware is working on now, is a worldwide airtime transfer hub. Once that system is in place, and is secure, it can be built on. Part of the problem, Abraham explained, is that international money transfer is tightly regulated at the moment – to make it harder to commit fraud and launder money. Security is paramount, and that can be tested with the airtime hub.
More to come!
My interview with Abraham was quite a bit longer than that. We spoke about how operators and banks are reacting to mobile money, what kind of services Roamware can offer to banks, and implementations currently in place around the world. And more beyond that! I’ll be posting the longer version later on in the week, if you’re interested.
Interesting approach and their global network certainly helps . The idea of airtime transfers globally will be certainly useful for immigrants wanting to fund prepaid accounts of family members back home. Great application for scheduled monthly transfers and also an interesting gifting idea.