NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The mobile payment solutions industry in India has seen significant growth in recent years (see side panel) and observers believe that growth is only going to explode in the future with Indian consumers’ increased use of mobile phone and credit cards.

Numerous Indian companies serving the mobile payment market have emerged, attracting not only the attention of Indian consumers but also global investors.

One of those companies is Mumbai-based MoneyOnMobile. In April 2012, Dallas-based Calpian Inc. acquired a significant stake the startup, which offers a stored-value mobile payments service that gives consumers the ability to use their mobile phones to pay for goods and services or transfer funds from one cell phone to another using simple SMS text functionality.

Today, MoneyOnMobile has over 82.5 million unique phone number customers-to-date and over 186,000 retail partners offering the service in India. Many of the customers do not have bank accounts or access to traditional forms of credit, according to Shashank M. Joshi, founder and President of MoneyOnMobile. About 70 percent of India’s population lives in some 600,000 rural villages. Money-on-Mobile gives consumers who work in cities a way to send money to friends and family in more remote areas, Joshi said. It’s being dubbed by some as ‘the PayPal of India.’

Joshi first founded the company in 2010 after having been involved in the payments business in the United States since 2004.