Sanjay Swamy, CEO of mobile payments company MChek has resigned. Confirming the development to MediaNama, Swamy said that he'd been thinking about it for a while. "The company has a large number of strategic relationships and most of the work is now operational. Between Airtel and Docomo there are significant number of SIMs operational with MChek". (Ed: he declined to share an exact number). "With financial inclusion and mobile banking becoming a key part of the banks focus, it's the right time for someone to come in and take it to the next level. It's been four years and I want to take some time off." Prior to joining mChek as its CEO, Swamy ran Ketera India, another startup, and spent around 12 years in the Silicon Valley. Competition has been rife in the mobile payments space, though how any of them have been performing is not explicitly known. MChek competes with other funded companies such as Paymate (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Mayfield Fund, and Sherpalo Ventures), Obopay (Nokia has invested a reported $70 million in it, other backers include Qualcomm, Redpoint ventures, Essar Telecom USA and AllianceBernstein). VAS company One97 Communications (Intel Capital) had also launched it's service PayTM. Mobile payments can also be facilitated using prepaid instruments like Itz Cash, and it is believed that a mobile operator has also applied for launching an MPesa like prepaid instrument in India. Apart from Airtel and DoCoMo, MChek has partnered banks like SBI, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Standard Chartered, Visa. The company has raised finding…
