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April 28, 2014

IPsmarx and Prepay: Empowering Service Providers to Generate Revenue in Multibillion Dollar Mobile Top Up Market

Anurag Jain and Ajay Vikas founded Prepay Nation in 2010. It seems that they had an ingenious idea for enabling micropayments across international borders in the form of mobile phone airtime. Prepay's network spans four continents and 80 countries, which is comprised of 200 mobile operator partnerships with over 175,000 retail points of sale.

Prepay connects mobile network operators and retail distributors for the sale of international mobile airtime. Combining a scalable platform with its network of international operators, and retail distributors means they can facilitate the transfer of airtime across borders more easily, more efficiently, and with a farther reach than anyone else in the industry.

IPsmarx delivers telecom and communications technology, equipping service providers in 75 countries with the solutions they need to fulfill their missions, adapt to an evolving market and drive new revenue streams. It is a provider of prepaid and postpaid VoIP solutions for service providers. The IPsmarx Voice over IP (VoIP) Softswitch Solution is designed to provide service providers with an all-in-one management tool for all various IP telephony services.

On Thursday, it was announced that the interoperability of the IPsmarx International Mobile Up platform with Prepay Nation’s service. Service providers using the IPsmarx Mobile International Top Up Solution can now make use of Prepay Nation’s extensive distributor and mobile operator network.

A study conducted last year by Juniper Research stated that international transfers made via mobile phone will exceed $10 billion by the end of the year. However, awkward regulations have made airtime top ups a more popular mechanism among service providers to deliver funds across borders than cash transfers between mobile devices.

IPsmarx CEO, Arash Vahidnia, said “The airtime remittance market is a promising avenue for our clients and service providers in general. Hundreds of millions of people need a cost-effective, reliable means of international remittance and our partnership with Prepay Nation will further empower our clients to deliver these services; and generate revenue by doing so.”

The term airtime remittance refers to the end users ability to purchase airtime from mobile operators in other countries. This airtime can then be used by their contacts that are located in those countries. A typical scenario would find the sender of mobile airtime living in a developed country and the recipient living in a developing country.

What this means is that while purchasing airtime is cost-effective for the sender, it is usually unreasonably expensive for the recipient due to the difference in purchasing power between the two. In most cases, mobile airtime is used as currency in many of these countries. This is a clear cut case that something definitely gets lost in the translation.

When you take into consideration that 2.5 billion people lack access to financial services yet somehow 1.7 billion of these people have a mobile phone, you can see how airtime remittance becomes a highly relevant and useful form of remittance. This is true for millions of migrants and guest workers all around the world. Therefore, that makes it a very promising revenue opportunity for service providers.

According to IPsmarx, the International Mobile Top Up solution integrates with the IPsmarx Class 5 Softswitch. This then enables providers to deliver and manage multiple services, such as VoIP, from a single turnkey platform. Combining integrated billing with an intuitive user interface offers a solution that is designed to give providers the precision, intelligence and control they need to effectively manage their business.




Edited by Maurice Nagle


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