I feel that MMT is a reality and the future for payments. Its how the stakeholders bring it to the masses.

the truth is the convenience factor especially in these times of anxieties. We are entering the age of wisdom as called by Stephan Covey. The regular activities must be made so much easier that human resource could be diverted for more intellectual work.

Regards,
Fahad

The only motive for not having an incisive regulatory attention from Gorvenments is because they are not seeing the money yet. When the usage and the taxes beeing payed on invoices become interesting according to the amount of transactions, you must bet they will regulate the MMT very quickly…

Regards,

Americo

Here we get into the attempts to define mobile money transfer as a unique capability that is depenedent on the mobile device and network. These certainly are the modus operandi of the day but they hold little cache as the way forward.

Why does a separate system need to be set up that tariffs the exchange of payments and commerce while adding very little legitimate value?

Just because wireless operators hole monopolies on spectrum should not allow them to artificially impose mechanisms that stipend off a piece of every transaction. The role that wireless networks should and likely will play as they become open to IP conventions is to service the secure communications needs of available and new transaction clients.

Undoubtedly there will be much made and systems put in place to control how MMT occurs. How it can and should occur is as a communications interface for commerce to proliferate. Attempts to stranglehold open commerce will inevitably fail due to inefficiency and free choice.

Where MMT has merit is in establishing commercial devices and payment systems including merchant terminals capable of working with leading vendors mobile devices.

As far as restrictions – the likely trend will follow Internet norms for open commerce. If an operator, web service or new entrant offers easy and acceptably secure payment systems, they will gain market share. Payments yield to the most common denominators and attempts by individual operators to dominate their customer base will likely give way to user preference.

Certainly the business model depend a lot on the regulatory freedom given by the central banks however mobile operators come into the game. The technology has been available for a good while, the question would be why Organizations such as WE, MG.. did not launch such services yet?
My understanding is that the market is simply no ready yet, most of money transfers transactions are performed by customers who does not use technology and only trust big names with a good receiving network. This may be the answer.

Kind Regards,

Christos

[1] The end user/subscriber experience has to be really simple & intuitive.
[2] Though you mention that for the end user it may look simple, in reality I am not aware of any real MMT systems/deployment.
[3] It has to be made secure as well as simple for the end user to have confidence to start using it & do large transfers.
[4] As always, the regulatory bodies will start rearing their heads with unnecessary issues which should not affect the end user experience.
[5] MMT has to be made available for B2B, B2C, C2C & C2B transactions.
[6] Those who would be promoting/launching MMT need to have hell lot of patience for the technology to catch on & later on be prepared to handle the huge transactions that will be made. I dont feel MMT to be a big hit in the market as soon as its launched as the subscribers will be very apprehensive about the security, that too in conventional markets. Once the same is popular with people, the transactions will be huge as is the case with internet banking.
[7] There should be no major restrictions in the transactions based on their operator or bank accounts. It has to be very similar to normal banking. This will be a major roadblock for its success.
[8] The billing systems (post & prepaid) systems should be revamped to support MMT.
[9] Last but not least in markets like India, where churn is very high, it needs to be seen how operators ensure revenue loss after a MMT is done by a subscriber but simply throws away his sim card after the transaction.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

Niranjan Srinivasan
Wataniya, Kuwait