Telecommunication sector has witnessed numerous innovations in terms of value added services to customers. Now a days, accessing all social media platform through mobile phone is highly in trend. All the bundled solutions such as games, music, social media, banking, NFC, QR codes are being catered to consumers through mobile phones. The latest drift is to offer mobile money solutions to all developing and underdeveloped countries. Implementing mobile money ecosystem in a developed country is comparatively less challenging while deploying the same ecosystem in undeveloped country is an uphill task. However customers yearn to experience a value proposition in new mobile payments with the service provided by financial institutions or telecom.
International money remittance is one of the services which attracts exceedingly large number of customers.
According to a report by CGAP, the deployments that disperse remittance into mobile wallets are growing at exponential rate. There are significant initiatives taken by remittance giants such as Western Union, Moneygram, BICS to endorse digital remittances.
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Recently Western Union has partnered with eSewa (Nepal) to disperse remittance into a digital wallet. The inclination of remittance companies to Nepalese market could be easily understood by the statistics provided by World Bank. As per World Bank, the inward remittance to Nepal has stretched to USD 4.9 billion in 2012. This initiative is committed to offer mobile money remittance to almost 5 Million Nepalese living overseas whereby a sender can visit Western Union agent locations or access online channels to send money to Nepal and beneficiary can receive it in his/her eSewa mobile wallet. The service not only allows customers to receive remittance in a stored value account but also provide them with the features such as utility bill payments, mobile topups, recharge cards, peer to peer transfer and what not.
This innovative channel will surely be introducing an insurgency in mobile money remittance space, however the question regarding volume of transactions will remain unanswered. The primary reason of low transaction volumes could be considered lack of awareness of mobile money channels. The senders generally consider a more reliable, fast, convenient & secure channel for sending money back to their family and might not be aware of using digital channels. While at the received end, beneficiaries prefers receiving the remittance either in their bank accounts or visiting a payout location. Technology such as receiving money in mobile wallet is still at its early stage in underdeveloped countries. At present, there are various companies operating mobile wallet in underdeveloped countries. We have bKash in Bangladesh, Wing in Cambodia, easypaisa in Pakistan, eSewa in Nepal and many more. However winning confidence of customers to receive remittance in mobile phone is yet to be realized.
Customers are yet to be confident regarding its security and reliability. Thus creating awareness & educating customers are pre requisite in order to endorse mobile money. The first step for customers could be peer to peer transfer or domestic remittance which would eventually entice them to use further services such as international remittance. However techtitans are quite sure that the customers will surely welcome this technology sooner or later. Considering the rapid development, the technological revolution in remittance space will continue to take place and there will be number of innovations to be witnessed regarding delivery channels as well.
