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Top level
Industry Information
Technologies
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For the mobile operator, topping up prepaid accounts by SMS has several benefits. It is a lower-cost method of adding credit than vouchers, by about 10-15%.
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Providing prepaid mobile top-up by SMS also allows the cellco to wrap additional services around the top-up, in a way that could increase ARPU. For example, by tracking prepaid usage, the cellco can send the subscriber an alert when their credit is getting low and encourage the subscriber to top up by sending an SMS - as opposed to waiting until the subscriber can get to a retail outlet to buy a voucher. "This enables operators to change the pattern of spending for prepaid users," Ward says, by eliminating the pattern of "low balance, low usage": as credit gets lower, subscribers typically stop making voice calls and start sending lower-cost SMSes.
Upaid is providing an SMS prepaid top-up service to Moroccan operator Meditel, in conjunction with credit card issuer Visa International's CEMEA (central and eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa) division and Moroccan bank Banque Marocaine du Commerce Exterieur. The service was initially a pilot that Upaid rolled out with Visa and technology partner IBM. (In December, Upaid signed a contract to provide IBM's Mobile Payments on Demand service.) The pilot has since been converted into a contract to cover Visa's CEMEA region, although Ward anticipates that the two companies will initially enter only about 12 key markets.
MasterCard has also launched a top-up service for prepaid mobile accounts, called rePower, that allows a bank to offer cardholders a web site on which they can register their card and their mobile phone number. Subscribers can then top up their accounts - or the accounts of others - using the web site, WAP, SMS, IVR or an automated debit. The service is available to Cingular and JPMorgan Chase customers in the U.S. and is a cross-operator, multiple-banking product in South Africa
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