Partners Zain, Connectiva, Protiviti and Dataupia are exploring how to scale services in the Developing a Scalable mCommerce Model Catalyst at Forumville this week at Management World. Perhaps the biggest single issue is interoperability between different mobile money services. Communications service provider Zain has a presence in 23 Middle Eastern and African countries and is rolling out its mCommerce and payments service, Zap, across them.
Blaise Pascal Okwo Ebwil, regional manager, revenue assurance and fraud management, Zain Group, points out that it is more profitable to encourage existing customers to spend more (and avoid churn) than it is to recruit new ones, and interoperability is key to this.
The Catalyst project has integrated the relevant parts of the TM Forum standards library as an initial step towards establishing a common platform, Abhi Ghosh of Connectiva Systems explains. This is contributing to the work undertaken by Protiviti, which is consulting on the processes, business models, different networks and systems used by mobile operators and banks.
Having real-time information about who is using which service and to what extent where is very important for a number of reasons, and a snapshot of what is going on is displayed on a dashboard using data from a Dataupia database. This data can be sliced and diced in many ways.
In the first instance, it helps ensure the mCommerce services comply with banking regulations, both within a country and across country borders, including knowing your customer obligations, anti-money laundering, data privacy and security regulations.
Okwo Ebwil says, “All control of a transaction is done from the point of origination so ensure that it is genuine and legal; then there are security and data privacy issues to consider, and tracking where the money goes.”
In addition to this however, up-to-date usage information enables sales and marketing teams to monitor, record and analyze usage, and one of the dashboard’s many attributes is to allow them to run “what if” scenarios based on patterns and projections to help upsell and cross-sell products. This helps them set quarterly and annual targets, as well as short-term goals of campaigns targeted at particular segments.
Most of all, though, the idea is that the findings from this Catalyst can serve as a starting point in interoperability discussions between network operators and banks so that mCommerce can truly scale up.
Just how much benefit it can bring is demonstrated by Coca-Cola’s use of Zap in its distribution network. Whereas up-country distributors used to have to travel and deposit cash before they received supplies, now the money is sent by Zap, cutting three days out of the supply cycle.
This and 14 other Catalyst projects will be on view in Forumville on the third level of the Acropolis Convention Center Wednesday until 7 p.m. and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.