Mobile wallet concept

Our company’s very first foray into wireless Philippines was through our flagship service Bidshot Auctions. This entailed the convergence of a website with a user’s mobile phone which enabled a user to fully manage his auctions while away from his PC. This was a well-conceived route to take, most especially in our country where PC penetration was a dismal three percent versus mobile’s 24 percent. Such a genuine innovation paid off which led to Bidshot Auctions’ continuing overwhelming patronage by many and to the sorry demise of Bidshot’s competitors who are now all buried in some dot-com graveyard. As our auction community grew exponentially, retailers saw the opportunities for a borderless storefront and began consigning their products to Bidshot, which, in turn, gave birth to a payment solution problem. We witnessed the inconvenience our users had to endure when lining up in banks just to make a deposit for payment of purchased goods. This defeated the whole purpose of mobile commerce! Credit card holders were also a minority in the Philippines and with the existing fearful mindset of Filipinos toward online transactions, a pure e-payment solution was far from reality. We exhausted every conceivable model but yet to no avail. How we wished for an over-the-air payment solution that utilized our mobile phone as a wallet, enabling you to simply type in a peso amount and send the value via text to a user’s cellphone number in order to credit him of the said value.

Late last year saw the debut of Smart’s Pasa Load that enabled a prepaid subscriber to pass on load to another prepaid subscriber. It was such a simple concept, yet the very first of its kind in the world. In fact, this same product is nominated for the Innovation Award at the ongoing World GSM Conference in Cannes, France. Just last month, too, an upgraded version of the concept was launched by Globe which allowed a prepaid or postpaid subscriber to pass load to another subscriber. A broader amount of load options was offered along with a PIN feature for added security. I have used the Share-a-Load product of Globe on numerous occasions and so far, it has worked great. The transfer instruction consists of just typing the amount as a message and sending it to 2917XXXXXXX. Let’s suppose I want to transfer 10 pesos to this phone number, 0917-1234567, you just text 10 and send it to 29171234567. As simple as that! Load is transferred from my postpaid cell to my prepaid recipient within seconds. After doing your first transfer, you will then be asked to define your own PIN for the security of future load transfers. Where else would you expect such a product to emanate from but from the text and prepaid capital of the world. Just in a span of a few months, we are starting to witness an evolution toward the mobile wallet concept which many have been awaiting. As we head into the summer, I expect further upgrades to be made on Globe and Smart’s established load platforms. More options for remitting load and expanded features will be made available as part of the products’ natural growth cycle. Other possible uses of the mobile wallet concept within the year would be as a micro payment solution for low-cost purchases such as for prepaid access to Internet service, Wi-Fi service, online gaming credits and advance movie ticket purchase.

The doors are now toward the actual transmittal of currency over the air, thus breathing newfound life into m-commerce. A word of caution though to just manage expectations: all types of purchases will never be served by a mobile wallet. The value of mobile wallets does not lie in the ability to do "everything," but rather the ability to provide some unique value to a particular category of transaction, such as "fast cashless payments."

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Patrick R. Garcia is managing director of Bidshot Wireless Services. For comments or suggestions, text your message to 233011 (Globe) or 2430018 (Smart), or e-mail [email protected].