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Canwest News Service
The idea of using a mobile phone as a wallet has been pushed by futurists and technology vendors alike, and in Canada, it’s inching closer to reality.
A new service called Zoompass lets Canadians send and receive money through their handsets.
While it works a lot like the Internet payment service PayPal, Zoompass is, for now, not aimed at retailers but at friends who need to pay small debts and parents sending food money to kids in college.
“Our research shows people are looking for ways to simplify their payment experience,” said Robin Dua, president of En-Stream.
Wireless users sign up for a free Zoompass account and pay 50ยข to make an instant money transfer.
In the past week, Zoompass released an application for BlackBerry phones, but the service works on any device with a Web browser. That’s because Zoompass is a product of En-Stream, a joint venture between Canada’s three wireless carriers, Bell Mobility, Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Corp.
However, in Quebec, Virgin Mobile and the wireless offering from Videotron Ltd. are excluded from the service.
Zoompass can expect to meet plenty of resistance from Canadians, predicted Robert Burbach a Toronto analyst at Financial Insights, a division of research firm IDC.
“They’re going into uncharted territory. They will need a whole lot of education on why people should use it,” he said.
“Plus you need a smartphone for the service to run well. And smartphone penetration in Canada is not very high.”
Mr. Dua argues that the support of Canada’s main telecom firms, as well as the backing of
major banks, should allay any doubts consumers may have about Zoompass.
Though fierce rivals in the wireless business, Bell, Telus and Rogers have been known to co-operate in deals that benefit all three. One other such collaboration has Telus reselling Bell’s satellite TV product under its own brand in Western Canada, where Bell doesn’t compete.
Similarly, Bell and Telus agreed to share cellular towers as both beef up their networks to compete against Rogers. Yet Rogers and Bell are partners in Inukshuk Wireless, a project to bring wireless communications to remote parts of Canada.
This kind of “co-opetition,” in which carriers compete on the retail level but work together in the back end, is becoming more common, both in mature markets and in emerging nations, said Iain Grant, a telecom analyst with the Sea-Board Group.
