Glenbrook Partners, which covers the payments industry and strategies, ran a story today that Obopay has moved away from their 2-step "Store & Forward" approach and to the Mpayy model of enabling payments directly from users' checking accounts.
Ramy Mora, VP of Marketing at Obopay notes that the decision was made as a result of focus groups and not the careful study by Obopay employees study and testing of Mpayy's service. We'll take them at their word.
Obopay, which has taken $46 million in Venture Capital financing, started with a "fat-client" solution. A "fat-client" requires the download of software onto a mobile device, requiring a team of developers to ensure that each Operating System put out by Motorola, Apple, Nokia, LG, Samsung, etc. is compatible with the subsequent releases. This is hugely capital intensive pursuit requiring a huge team of developers. In fact, as recently as January, the company added support for Blackberry users through specific software on the device.
Obopay moved to a thin-client solution based around a WAP site, but maintained its "Store & Forward" model. It will be interesting to see what Obopay does with their payment lags and accounting opening process now that the money goes directly from Person A's checking account to Person B's Obopay account where it can be withdrawn with an ATM card. This introduces significant credit risk, and we'll look to see how they handle it.
Obopay does have a slick front-end, something Mpayy can not claim presently, and they do have a relationship with Citigroup, but usage has fallen since the partnership was announced. Perhaps this most recent change will pick the traffic back up.
Recent Press for Mpayy
Mpayy has received two "also ran" mentions in sidebars and lists of mobile payment companies of note.
In the Nilson report, Mpayy was included in a list of alternative payment systems that was a sidebar to an article covering Steve Case's startup, Revolution Money, which recently concluded a deal with Fifth Third Bancorp to accept the Revolution Card in bricks & mortar stores.
Today, Mpayy got word that it would be mentioned in Javelin Strategy's "Mobile Person-to-Person Payments and Transfers: Security and Timing Are Everything" report.
Don't shell out $2,250 to learn about Mpayy, though, as this is evidently the extent of our honorable mention. We very much appreciate the coverage, though, and enjoy being mentioned in the same breath with Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Obopay, Textpayme, etc.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Obopay Adopts Mpayy Thin-Client Single Step Payment Process
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2 comments:
NBice presentation...
good....
Regards,
payment processing
Thanks for all of the information. Many businesses with an online component should be using, or at least looking into secure payment processing systems.
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