Mobile payment usage has been growing year on end worldwide. Opinno interviewed mobile payment provider MobiAdvanced’s CEO and Founder Oscar Moreno to know more about the solutions offered by the company and Moreno’s thinking about the payment system’s future.
Baudo: Tell me a little about yourself. How did you become an entrepreneur?
Moreno: I’m 26 years old and I’ve been working in the Internet industry since I was 15 years old. What began as a hobby ultimately became my profession. First and foremost, I believe that to be successful in setting up your own business you must strongly believe and be passionate about your ideas so that you may overcome any setbacks that you are faced with along the way and when you are young there can be many.
Baudo: What are MobiAdvanced services for?
Moreno: “MobiAdvanced allows consumers to pay for virtual money, gifts, products, services etc. in applications, games, webs etc by mobile payment.”
“From the perspective of the consumer, the way of working is very simple. The user selects the amount of virtual money that he/she wishes to purchase and sends an SMS with their mobile phone. The user then receives an SMS with a code, once this code is entered and validated during the payment process the user will receive the virtual currency.”
“MobiAdvanced provides an alternative method of payment for consumers who may not have a credit card or bank account and wish to carry out simple translations with their mobile phone and without having to give personal details.”
Baudo: How does the payment system technically work for businesses?
Moreno: “After the client has registered with us, we provide a number of tools and API documentation so that the integration of our system with their product could be as easy as possible.”
Baudo: Where did you start? What countries are you serving around the world?
Moreno: “MobiAdvanced was first launched in Spain as it is a Spanish-owned company and unlike other mobile payment companies MobiAdvanced has primarily focused on the Spanish speaking market. Subsequently, its services were launched in Latin America (Argentina, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela) and also in Brazil and Portugal. Covering practically the entire Spanish speaking market in over 20 countries, MobiAdvanced is connected with a total of 70 mobile network operators.”
Baudo: Why did you choose the Latin American market to extend your services? Is it because of economic potential there?
Moreno: “Today, the penetration of mobile phones in many countries is over 100% of the population. In the case of Latin America, it exceeds 90% and the use of mobile phones as a payment method is one of the most used and easily accessible to consumers.”
“Mobile payment systems like ours offer microtransactions so it is a system that can adjust to the economic purchasing power of users in developing Latin American countries.”
Baudo: What future do you see for mobile payment systems?
Moreno: “Mobile payments have only just started and they are working well as they can offer products with a freemium business model which consists in providing you with a part of the product for free and another part (normally extras) paid with virtual currency. On the other hand, the operators still have to reduce their costs so that more products can be marketed through mobile payment systems.”
Baudo: Running your own business is really stressful. How do you escape?
Moreno: “It’s complicated, but certainly a good TV series, movie, holiday or just a beer in good company always helps to escape the stress as an entrepreneur.”
Baudo: Other European companies provide similar systems’ applications of mobile phone contactless payment services for remote payments such as the French company Kwixo, or UK Quick Tap made from the partnership between French Orange and British Barclaycardcompanies. In Latin America, mobile payment companies exist too such as Yellow Pepper mobile financial network or VeriFone' mobile retail system GlobalBay.
Innovative technology-based companies such as MobiAdvanced are showing the growing popularity of mobile payments in Europe and embody the current and future innovative ecosystem.
This article has initially been posted by Lena Baudo on January 18th, 2012 on Opinno‘s blog (Open Innovation).