Loop Mobile and ZipCash has introduced a mobile payment service, M-Wallet, that offers peer-to-peer money transfer on any mobile of any operator across India, reports IIFL. In August last year, Loop Mobile and ZipCash offered their subscribers to use mobile phones as a virtual wallet for mobile & utility services such as electricity bill payments, prepaid recharges, digital TV recharge, online shopping, buying movie tickets and more.
They’ve now expanded the mandate of the service to include person-to-person (P2P) payments, thus allowing subscribers to send money to any person, across operators.
Caveat (Nikhil adds)
There is a small issue though – prepaid payment licensees like ZipCash do now allow money to be withdrawn from the wallet. This suggests that even in case of M-Wallet – since it is ZipCash, money can only be transferred from one ZipCash account to another: it is virtual money. This means that it is likely that a person receiving the money will can only transfer it to another ZipCash customer, irrespective of which telecom operator he/she is a customer of. Zipcash has this advantage, by virtue of being an independent payments service, as opposed to something like Airtel Money, which is linked to a telecom operator, and hence limited to its own customers.
Loop’s Limitations
Apart from that, out of India’s 850 million mobile connections Loop Mobile only constitutes for 3,150,308, or 0.53% (Approx) of the total mobile connections. Loop is fine from a test case perspective, but ZipCash is unlikely to achieve scale through this partnership.
Note that Nokia, which offered a mobile money service called Nokia Money in rural India shut shop.
