There are no doubts in my mind mobile payments market is set for an explosive growth. Judging by the success of services like M-Pesa and the recent launch of Google Wallet, there’s a ton of money to be made by providing mobile financial services to people all around the world, whether they live in developed or developing countries.
A new entrant, GeoPay, announced plans to launch a full-scale mobile money transfer service in Central Asia in December 2011, as well as the establishment of a local office in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Once launched, the service will enable consumers to exchange cash from phone to phone – “providing instantaneous financial settlement services to its network of inter-connected mobile carriers’ customers using SMS/USSD technology.”
And after they’re “done” with Kyrgyzstan, GeoPay will undoubtedly expand to other markets with the goal to provide financial services to unbanked consumer markets in nations where users lack traditional methods of transferring cash from consumer to consumer.
Aside from the office in Central Asia, the company also opened an office (headquarters) in Reston, Virginia from where it will manage its global operations…
The question now is whether they have what it takes to compete in this increasingly competitive (though pretty big) market which is increasingly in the focus of big companies like Nokia and Google. We’ll see…