GSM award honors Filipino IT ingenuity

The mobile airtime tingi-tingi service Smart Load walked the red carpet when Smart Communications Inc. was honored with an innovation award at the "Oscar’s" ceremonies of the international mobile industry in Cannes, France recently.

Smart Load, the pioneering and highly successful electronic prepaid reloading service, was recognized as the "Best Mobile Application or Service – Consumer Market" by the GSM Association (GSMA), the global trade association of GSM mobile operators and equipment suppliers at the GSM 2004 Awards night.

Smart bested three other short-listed nominees for the award: United Arab Emirates’ DUCONT FZ-LLC, mobilkom Austria AG & Co KG, and London-based Shazam Entertainment.

This is the second time that the GSMA presented Smart with an award. In 2002, Smart bagged the "Most Innovative Service for Customers" award for its electronic wallet service Smart Money. To date, Smart remains the only Filipino operator to receive awards from the GSMA.

Smart Load is the world’s first electronic reloading service offering prepaid micro top-ups. The service combines the retail tingi-tingi strategy of consumer products in sachets with Smart’s homegrown IT innovations.

Smart Load runs on a robust mobile commerce platform that has been the backbone of Smart’s mobile commerce innovations since 1999.

"This prepaid micro business is very, very impressive," said the international panel of judges in its citation. "Not only is Smart Communications increasing its customer base and reducing churn, it is creating employment, creating new businesses, and multiplying its retail channels."

"The award is a big honor not only for Smart, but for the whole country," said Napoleon Nazareno, Smart president and CEO. "Our experience with Smart Load provides an immensely successful model for making cellular services available to a much broader market that operators in other countries may also apply."

"This is a validation that when it comes to technological ingenuity, Filipinos are on a par with the world’s best," he added.

The Best Mobile Application or Service award honors compelling and exciting consumer applications for voice and data that drive usage and contribute to industry growth. Previous winners include Finland’s Codeonline and the Vodafone group.

Introduced in May 2003 by Smart, Smart Load quickly became a commercial success and revolutionized the prepaid phone market in the Philippines. Instead of buying top-up cards, prepaid mobile phone users purchase electronic loads from retailers who transfer the credits "over-the-air" through SMS or text messaging.

Micro top-ups come in denominations of P115, P60 and P30, significantly more affordable than the lowest conventional top-up of P300.

In a few months after its launch, electronic micro top-up reloading has become very big in the Philippines. In a country where more than 95 percent of mobile phone users run on prepaid, mobile phone prepaid airtime is now being sold like Coke and candy through a distribution channel that extends to neighborhood stores and individual retailers.

Last December, Smart introduced another first with its Pasa Load, a service that enables Smart prepaid phone users to pass on to each other airtime loads via SMS. The loads range from P15 to as low as P2.

The first foray in lower-denomination loads was Smart’s Pure Txt 100. Launched in August 2002, the P100 top-up card was designed to be a transition service for people short of cash until they could save enough for a P300 card. To establish key differentiation, the service only allowed SMS. At its peak, over one million Smart prepaid users were loading up the card.

However, card distribution remained costly and cumbersome. Prepaid cards were also not easily available and vulnerable to theft and tampering. Thus, Smart started looking at reloading via SMS for a solution.

Reloading via SMS is not a recent introduction. Smart has been offering airtime reloads via SMS since December 2000 when it launched Smart Money.

Using the Smart Money menu in their mobile SIMs, subscribers can reload a prepaid phone via SMS. However, the electronic load came in the same denominations as the prepaid cards – P300, P500 and P1,000 – and the amount was deducted not from the airtime but from the Smart Money balance.

The combination of technologies and experiences with electronic reloading via Smart Money and the Pure Txt P100 top-up card set the stage for Smart Load.

"Smart is able to introduce these innovations because our services are backed by a strong mobile commerce platform. Our system is stable, flexible and mature. This is something you cannot just buy off the shelf or outsource to a third-party developer," Nazareno said.