International mobile money services firm Mi-Pay has launched an International Airtime Transfer (IAT) service which it says is ideal for consumer brands operating in developing countries such as India, Africa and Asia. Mi-Pay says its service overcomes many of the hurdles involved in providing ‘dollar value’ incentives to customers in these regions.
“Our IAT service allows organisations in one country to top-up or recharge the pre-paid mobile phones of individual contacts based in other countries, making it an ideal fulfillment mechanism for any brand running ‘value-based’ promotions,” says Mi-Pay CEO, Norman Frankel. “Around 3.8bn people now own, or have access to, a mobile phone. 72 per cent of these use pre-paid mobiles, where airtime value is purchased in advance. Airtime is, therefore, a highly desired commodity, particularly in the world’s key developing markets where mobile phone penetration is booming.”
Mi-Pay’s IAT platform currently runs as a successful added-value service solution for international mobile operators and financial institutions, and the company says it can be easily tailored to meet brand campaign requirements. It offers a flexible customer inducement for many forms of promotion, including on-pack offers, voucher or token collection, online competitions, or in-channel lead generation.
Working closely with creative agencies and in-house brand professionals, Mi-Pay says it can identify the mobile operators most suited to the countries being targeted. From a single web-based interface, it is able to provide prepaid top-ups to over 2bn consumers across the world in a growing number of countries.
With Mi-Pay, agencies or brands are able to allocate a ‘total amount’ of top-up value to their specific campaign. They can then link promotions into the Mi-Pay service through a simple, secure web-service interface and use this to deliver agreed mobile phone top-up values to the phone balances of consumers’ who successfully fulfil the promotion criteria. 
For each top-up, recipients receive an accompanying SMS text message with a brief explanation of the amount received and the brand details. The brand organization also receives full confirmation of all transactions. As an added bonus, an additional pre-loaded branded message of up to 120 characters long can be sent direct to the consumer in the recipient’s language, as required.
To help evaluate campaign success, Mi-Pay also provides a reporting regime that provides access to collected details on recipients, including their names, mobile phone numbers and the volumes of top-ups taking place across individual corridors on a regular basis. The overall value being consumed, against the overall campaign budget, is also closely tracked, and clients are given advance warning if the balance falls below a pre-agreed percentage of the overall budget assigned to provide top-ups.
