Universal Financial Access - India
Make India an Inclusive Economic Superpower
Beam - Towards a cashless solution ?
BEAM (Anand Shrivastav – CMD) a company funded by Reliance Ventures and Norwest ( I think) ran a half page Ad in MINT on Tuesday, 08 December 2009. This is on page 7. For those who cannot get the epaper or hard copy I have extracted a few snippets.
Beam competes with amongst others OboPay, Paymate, ITZ Card, Mchek, Atom and Eko (a company I cofounded). UFA is agnostic and the more innovation and capital that enters the area the better it is.
Hopefully unbanked consumers will have choices and competition will drive down prices and improve offerings.
Snippets follow
1. BEAM’s disposable prepaid cards are available at 25000 retailers in denominations from RS 100 to Rs 1000. After a simple one time registration by SMS subscribers can use their mobiles ( any low end mobile) to load their Beam account which can then be used to make a wide variety of payments
2. Subscribers can also get services from Beam Sahayaks who are educated unemployed young women and also bank/insurance agents, retired defence personnel etc. Through this BEAM provides grassroot employment
3. The first phase of rolling out in the Hindi heartland has been completed with BEAM services available in 12 states, 33 cities and two mega metros ( Delhi & Mumbai)
4. Following its stupendous success it is not surprising that Beam is now a case study at Columbia University and was recently selected by HRH Princess Maxima of the Netherlands ( UN Advisor on Poverty Alleviation) as one of the only ten companies around the globe ( the only one from India) .
5. We are fundamentally different from the other service provider’s viz. M-Check, Paymate, OboPay etc who are actually service providers of banks or telecom operators …… We are into mobile payments and do not require bank, credit cards or debit cards at all… If you have a mobile phone you can Beam.
6. Beam has been able to acquire over 500,000 customers as its active subscribers. Of these 99% do not have any banking relationship – hence are unbanked. We expect the aforesaid number to cross 1 million by March 2010.
7. There is no fee levied on the subscriber either on purchase of Beam card or when paying merchants
8. The service being telecom operator neutral works seamlessly across all networks.
9. Beam has regulatory authorization from RBI as well as registration from DOT. Beam conforms to GSM and CDMA as well as PCI-DSS and ISO standards which make the systems, processes and transactions banking world class.
Beam competes with amongst others OboPay, Paymate, ITZ Card, Mchek, Atom and Eko (a company I cofounded). UFA is agnostic and the more innovation and capital that enters the area the better it is.
Hopefully unbanked consumers will have choices and competition will drive down prices and improve offerings.
Snippets follow
1. BEAM’s disposable prepaid cards are available at 25000 retailers in denominations from RS 100 to Rs 1000. After a simple one time registration by SMS subscribers can use their mobiles ( any low end mobile) to load their Beam account which can then be used to make a wide variety of payments
2. Subscribers can also get services from Beam Sahayaks who are educated unemployed young women and also bank/insurance agents, retired defence personnel etc. Through this BEAM provides grassroot employment
3. The first phase of rolling out in the Hindi heartland has been completed with BEAM services available in 12 states, 33 cities and two mega metros ( Delhi & Mumbai)
4. Following its stupendous success it is not surprising that Beam is now a case study at Columbia University and was recently selected by HRH Princess Maxima of the Netherlands ( UN Advisor on Poverty Alleviation) as one of the only ten companies around the globe ( the only one from India) .
5. We are fundamentally different from the other service provider’s viz. M-Check, Paymate, OboPay etc who are actually service providers of banks or telecom operators …… We are into mobile payments and do not require bank, credit cards or debit cards at all… If you have a mobile phone you can Beam.
6. Beam has been able to acquire over 500,000 customers as its active subscribers. Of these 99% do not have any banking relationship – hence are unbanked. We expect the aforesaid number to cross 1 million by March 2010.
7. There is no fee levied on the subscriber either on purchase of Beam card or when paying merchants
8. The service being telecom operator neutral works seamlessly across all networks.
9. Beam has regulatory authorization from RBI as well as registration from DOT. Beam conforms to GSM and CDMA as well as PCI-DSS and ISO standards which make the systems, processes and transactions banking world class.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Basudeb Sen on -
This BEAM is great. So, are the others like OboPay, Paymate, ITZ Card, Mchek, Atom and Eko. Unfortunately they do not find mention in RBI Governor's speech.
Many dot.companies came up in the 1999-2000 in India: some of them were bound to fail but a few others failed because telecom policy favoured big players for both big as well as small telecom jobs.
The companies you have mentioned run the risk of similar State-determined development policy for the benefit of public sector banks - the banks will learn from these small companies and then absorb their businesses if not them as well.
And, if the banks take too much time, RBI will be forced to accept the new comers to grow bigger than the banks in the area of payment sevices business. Why even the department of Post may set up a real competitive model: the money order system has virtually gone: my driver in Kolkata can just gift a BEAM-like Pay-Post Card to his family in the Bihar village.
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