Obopay Geared To Penetrate the m-Payment Market In India

A recent article in a business daily read, “Cards are passé, mobile payments are the in thing”. With players like PayMate, mChek and Jigrahak having launched their services in the last 2 years, US-based Obopay now plans an ambitious foray into India. With m-payments yet to catch on with the masses, Aditya Menon, the Executive Director & CTO, speaks to Biztech 2.0 on the opportunities and challenges in this space.

What opportunities in the Indian market drive you to bring Obopay to India?

A large and growing proportion of worldwide mobile phone users are low income and un-banked consumers, many of them in developing economies around the world.

India is the third largest mobile subscriber market in the world after the U.S. and China. The total number of mobile subscribers is almost 200 million currently and is growing at an explosive rate every month. It is estimated that the Indian mobile subscriber market will reach around 350 million by 2010. This by any standards is a huge and dynamic market.

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When do you plan to launch Obopay in India? Have you tied up with any bank or merchants for the solution?

We plan to launch our service very soon. We are in negotiations with several private sector banks and in discussions with some bill aggregator companies as well.

Tell us about the technical architecture of Obopay and the technologies required to implement it?

The Obopay system is an end-to-end mobile payment service, which incorporates state-of-the-art client and server technologies. The server component of the Obopay system is a carrier grade, globally scaleable and fault tolerant enterprise transaction system. The Obopay server consists of the following main technologies:
• HTTP Server (Apache)
• J2EE Application Server (Weblogic)
• Database (Oracle RAC)
• Linux Operating System (Red Hat)
• Blade Server Hardware (IBM)
The mobile client component of the Obopay system works across mobile carriers and is available on the following mobile platforms:
• J2ME (Includes Symbian)
• BREW
• .NET CF
• WAP
How well is Obopay equipped to deal with network issues and security concerns of users?

Our technical solution comprises a highly redundant internet architecture. In addition, we plan to offer the service through multiple SMS aggregators ensuring alternate channels of SMS processing.

Usage of the Obopay mobile application requires the consumer’s knowledge of a secret PIN that is not stored on the mobile device. Communication between the consumer mobile handset and the Obopay server is secure using several layers of encryption including application encryption, secure internet and secure wireless.
Considering that the mobile payment systems haven’t really caught on with the Indian masses, how will you ensure that your solution reverses that trend?

Our offering focuses on a Person to Person model, however, provided through banks. Person-to-person (P2P) addresses a key pain point – real time money transfers. Today real time money transfers are one of the most expensive, cumbersome and inconvenient financial services.

Our solution is comprehensive and completely different from any other service providers in the market because it is intended to replace cash by bringing small value payments into the regulated economy.

Recently, you mentioned that the real action is in the rural area. How would you go about tapping that potential using Obopay?

We are in discussions with leading microfinance agencies, to bring the unbanked population into the regulated economy. We feel we can provide a solution to the key challenges faced by the MFIs in terms of distribution and cost efficiencies.

We also feel that micro insurance distribution is another untapped option in rural areas and our solution will be key technology component in that arena.

Suhasini Seelin