By Vikas SN on Jun 4th, 2014
Money On Mobile, the mobile money service from the Calpian-backed mobile payment service provider My Mobile Payments Ltd (MMPL), claims to have 88.6 million unique phone number customers for the month ended April 30, 2014, up from 86.57 million customers reported in the previous month.
However, there is currently no information on how many of them are active on a monthly basis. In February 2014, Money on Mobile had claimed to have 3.68 million (3,679,810) monthly active users, which was marginally down on a monthly basis.
The processed transaction volume increased by 16.75% on a monthly basis to Rs 84.74 crore from Rs 72.58 crore in the previous month and the service is now supported by 1.84 lakh retail locations (184,418 locations), up from 1.81 locations in the previous month. The transaction volume per customer also increased to around Rs 215 for April this year, from Rs 185 rupees in March 2014.
In comparison, Money on Mobile’s competitor Airtel Money had reported an active base of 1.7 million for Q4-FY14, up from 1.3 million in the previous quarter. The amount transacted up 10.2% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to Rs 1,364.2 crore for the quarter, while the total number of transactions was at 38 million, up 25.8% QoQ.
Biometric-based mobile cash-out pilot
Calpian has also informed that Money on Mobile has been selected by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for a mobile cash out pilot using biometric authentication. This pilot will be rolled out in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Surat through 52 existing retail partner locations.
Remember that RBI had earlier put on hold Aadhaar-based biometric authentication in point-of-sale terminals last month and had instead started piloting a cash out facility with biometric authentication for mobile wallet services.
Besides Airtel Money, Money on Mobile competes with Vodafone’s M-Pesa which completed its pan-India rollout in March 2014, Tata DOCOMO’s mRupee, Beam Money, Paymate and Zipcash among others. Idea Cellular had received a mobile wallet license in December 2013 while Reliance Industries had received a mobile wallet license in November 2013 for a prepaid payment instrument called ‘Jio Money’.