Mobile Credit
by Imran Ali
I’ve been following the ethnographic studies of Nokia’s Jan Chipchase for some time, notably his insights and primary research into the usage of messaging and mobility in the developing world.
One of Chipchase’s observations in Uganda was the notion of ’sente’, using prepay airtime as a form of cheap, secure and convenient banking as well a pooling prepay credit between customers when sufficiently small denominations are available.
Springwise recently reported on similar usage trends in the Philippines, this time as operator-supported services, using SMS as a medium for transferring credit between subscribers. Incidentally, the Philippines was the first market where SMS revenue overtook voice minutes.
Globe Telecom’s user experience is simple - texting a PIN, transaction amount and recipient number to the service number is all that’s necessary. This incurs a charge of a couple pennies, which coupled with the volume of texting in the country, indicates that there’s a lucrative post-voice revenue stream for telcos, displacing their time+distance voice billing with large volumes of incremental transactional revenue.
