Zoompass is a Mobile Payment and Money Transfer service that was launched in Canada this past summer. Subscribers use the service to send, receive, and request money, as well as to make payments at Canadian retailers. The service was launched through a joint venture company, EnStream, by the three major mobile network operators in Canada – Rogers, Telus, and Bell Mobility. The three mobile operators collectively cover approximately 95% of the Canadian mobile subscribers. Mobile-Financial.com recently interviewed the President of EnStream, Robin Dua.

This past summer, a Mobile Money Transfer and Payments service was launched in Canada called Zoompass.  The service allows Canadians to use their mobile phones to send and receive money, as well as make payments at Canadian retailers.  The service is innovative because it not only taps into the growing demand for additional value added and financial services mobile subscribers, but it was also launched by a consortium of Canada’s three leading mobile network operators.

Mobile-Financial.com recently had the opportunity to learn more about the service, how it came to be, and what it has in store for the future of mobile money through an interview that we conducted with the president of the company behind Zoompass, Robin Dua of EnStream.    EnStream is a joint venture in Canada that is owned by the country’s three leading mobile network operators – Bell Mobility, Rogers, and Telus.   EnStream is focused on building the technology and services that Canadian mobile subscribers will use as part of their mobile financial lives, including mobile money transfers, bill payments, contactless payments and more.

The following are excerpts from our interview with Robin.  To listen to the interview in its entirety, please access the Mobile Financial Services Podcast by Mobile-Financial.com available in iTunes.  This podcast is part of a series of interviews that Mobile-Financial.com conducts with leaders and experts within the mobile financial services industry.  To access the podcast, please click here.  If you have any questions about the podcast or interview, please send an email to:  contactus@mobile-financial.com.

Mobile-Financial.com:  To start things off would you please provide our listeners with an overview of EnStream and Zoompass and what your role is within those companies?

Sure, I’ll start off telling you a little bit about EnStream.  We’re a joint venture company that’s owned by Bell, Rogers and Telus, Canada’s three largest mobile operators, representing approximately 95% of the wireless market in Canada and approximately twenty one million subscribers from coast to coast.

The three companies that are partners in EnStream got together several years ago with the view that in order for mobile commerce to really take off in Canada there needs to be common standards, interoperability as well as a shared vision around what the consumer’s experience looks like and they put together this joint venture company to focus on enabling all those areas in order to drive the mobile commerce ecosystem in Canada.

Just about a month ago we launched Zoompass, which is our first product.  It’s a mobile money transfer system that allows consumers on the Bell, Rogers, Telus network as well as their sub-brands and affiliates to be able to send, receive, as well as request money through their mobile phone and we support a wide range of devices through a downloadable application that’s very easy to use.  It allows consumers to access any one of their contacts in their address book on their phone to be able to initiate a mobile money transfer transaction or also request money from any one of their contacts as well.

Mobile-Financial.com: The collaboration that you mentioned between the operators in Canada, how will that benefit consumers going forward with Zoompass?

As you can imagine, if each of the carriers decided to get into the mobile commerce space independently, some of the services would not be that useful from a consumer standpoint and one of the examples is of course mobile money transfers, which is the first service that we launched.  You can imagine that if one of our carrier partners were to go at it alone, that it wouldn’t be a very useful service if users on the Bell network or Rogers or Telus network could only send money, receive money or request money from other users on their respective networks.  If there are competing services then what tends to happen is one, the interoperability isn’t there, but two, also the standards aren’t there to really drive adoption in a major way.

Mobile-Financial.com:  Can you give an example of how somebody would access the Zoompass application?

Sure, in terms of starting to use the service, the starting point is actually the Zoompass.com website.  Users would go through a short enrolment process and once that’s completed they could initiate a download of the application to their mobile device.  Now if they don’t have a device that’s supportive with the downloadable application they can still use it through a mobile browser site.

Once you have the application on your device, you have the ability to import the contacts that are in your address book on the phone and from there you can actually send or request money to or from any one of those contacts.

In terms of sending money, there are actually two ways of sending money; one is using a linked credit card and you can link a Visa or MasterCard card to your Zoompass account to be able to send money to any other user.

The other way to send money is using the balance in your Zoompass stored value account.  The way to get money into that account is through a preauthorized debit or online bill pay transaction which works with virtually all financial institutions in Canada.

Mobile-Financial.com:  So once you’ve basically enrolled in Zoompass you basically have a mobile wallet or a mobile source of funds?

That’s correct.  The application does function like a mobile wallet and gives you visibility into how much money you have in your Zoompass account. It also gives you the ability to send money from any linked credit card and it shows you all your transaction history for the transactions that you’ve made using your mobile application.

Mobile-Financial.com:  How about mobile payments or proximity payments, does Zoompass lend itself well into these areas?

Absolutely.  The launch of Zoompass is really the starting point for the convergence of the mobile phone and wallet.  Mobile money transfers is the first step in realizing that wallet vision and our goal is to build on the successes of the past and quickly add additional services that allow consumers to directly transact with the phone at the point of sale or use the phone to pay for transit fare, ticketing, and other types of applications as well.  So we are working towards enabling those types of solutions in the market, in partnership with payment networks as well as financial institutions.

Mobile-Financial.com:  What are customers saying about the service? How has it been received in the market place?

The response has been extremely favourable.  We’ve actually been amazed by the number of customers that have signed up for the services and that are actively using it given that we haven’t actively marketed the service at this stage.  The reason for that is that we decided early on that we wanted to take a two phase approach for the launch.

We decided that initially we would soft launch the service into the market and subsequently work with our carrier partners to plan a larger marketing campaign which would embed the Zoompass message into our carrier partners for our overall marketing programs.  So we’re about a month away from initiating those marketing programs with our carrier partners but even up to now, to see the overall media response that we’ve received, it’s been extremely positive and as a result of that, consumers are starting to hear about the service and sign up in fairly large numbers.

Mobile-Financial.com:  North Americans have a tremendous amount of access to financial services already.  Why do people adopt Zoompass in Canada? And what are the benefits that they receive?

I think that’s a great question.  If you compare some of the mobile money transfer services in different parts of the world that are successful -- a large number of them are in markets that are still developing. The payment systems are very rudimentary, they don’t have real time offerings and settlement systems in place, but what they do have in place is robust cellular networks and in those markets. The mobile money transfer services are really filling a void that exists in the market.  The payment systems aren’t developed yet, but everybody has a cell phone, so there is a unique opportunity to provide an electronic cash capability that allows people to essentially receive payments for services.

Developed markets, like Canada and the United States and of course others, are very different in the approach that you have to take to build mobile money transfer solutions or mobile commerce solutions more broadly.  What I mean by that is in Canada, we have some of the most advanced payment networks operating here in the world.  We’ve got the Interac debit system, which is really ubiquitous in terms of consumer access and also access on the merchant side.  We’ve got Visa and MasterCard also.  So the other trend is in terms of the underbanked populations.  It’s extremely small in Canada - virtually everybody that you talk to will have an Interac debit card in their wallet and probably two or three credit cards as well.

So the approach that you have to take here in Canada is obviously very different recognizing that people have bank accounts and have access to credit products.  So the product approach that we’re taking obviously embraces the payment networks that are in existence and the banks that obviously have pre-existing relationships with customers.  It requires more of a collaborative approach between the mobile operators on the one hand as well as the banking system on the other.  What you are going to see us do over the coming months is announce a number of partnerships with banks, as well as payment networks, to enable these services because it’s important to have that collaboration taking place within a market like Canada for the reasons that I mentioned.

Mobile-Financial.com:  Is Zoompass really just a mobile play or is it a financial service provider with multiple channels including mobile, online, card and more?

Zoompass is about enabling transactions with a phone.  The services that we’re enabling today are the ability to transfer money easily anytime, anywhere, using any phone.  You can certainly do that through the web channel as well.  We just use the web as an alternate channel that consumers can use.

We absolutely do provide a prepaid card that comes with the product as an option.  Now the prepaid card is a physical card today - the goal is eventually that all your cards will be in an electronic wallet on your phone.  There’s obviously a dependency there in terms of getting NFC handsets out to market before we could realize that opportunity.  So what we decided is that we would start issuing a contactless card as a way to build awareness for contactless payments before NFC actually arrives and we’re finding that consumers love the idea of being able to use the Zoompass card for small purchases at places like Tim Hortons, Loblaws, and other Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) across Canada.  It really is a good way to train users to wave the device in front of readers and of course teach them about our technology or contactless technology.

Mobile-Financial.com:  What role do you see banks taking with Zoompass within Canada?

Since we launched Zoompass we’ve had significant interest from all the major financial institutions as well as credit unions across Canada.  We’re actually in discussions with the top five banks as well as a handful of credit unions about enabling that opportunity.

We’ve always said that we launched Zoompass into the market as a direct consumer service as a way to demonstrate our technology capabilities and also the power of the user experience to the market, but our ultimate goal is to partner with the banks so that they can offer the service directly to their consumers and that’s how we see our business evolving over the near term - by partnering with the financial institutions as well as the payment networks to enable that opportunity.

Mobile-Financial.com:  In terms of the international reach of Zoompass, do you see yourself interconnecting with international hubs that are being established in the market place?

We absolutely do, I think it’s one of these things that is frankly a necessity.  We live in a very interconnected world these days and people are not only travelling overseas but certainly have friends and family that they need to be able to exchange money with readily, whether it’s on a personal level or a business level and we see opportunities to actually interconnect our Zoompass platform with other mobile money transfer systems across the world.

In terms of stats, Canada does approximately ten billion dollars in remittances on an annualized basis.  There’s a huge opportunity to tap into that and obviously migrate some of that to the mobile channel to make it more accessible to the consumer, so that they don’t have to take hours out of their day at times to find one of these money shops to go into and have to fill out a lot of forms and go through that type of hassle to send money to friends or family overseas.  So we’re very interested in enabling that opportunity and have had some meaningful discussions with key strategic players in different regions that would be great partners.

Mobile-Financial.com:  What do you define as success for both EnStream and Zoompass, and what are you doing to ensure that you achieve it?

Well success could be defined in two ways; one is by asking the question are we delivering the best possible payment experience to the customer and are we simplifying their payment experience by obviously leveraging the phone.  Secondly, success is defined as in terms of subscriber growth or transaction growth - those are some of the metrics that we are very in tuned to in our business.

We certainly see that the phone is a game changer in terms of the electronic payments and all of the consumer research that has been done clearly shows that customers want to be able to transact with their phone not only in terms of enabling easy electronic cash transfers but also directly transacting with a phone, whether it’s paying for the coffee at the local coffee or donut shop or paying for transit and those types of things.

It’s a much better user experience at the end of the day than looking for cash, fumbling for change and so forth.  So we’re obviously very focused on that mission which is focusing on the consumer at the end of the day and delivering the best possible experience.  That’s why this company was created and we’re certainly staying true to that vision.

To listen to the interview in its entirety, please access the Mobile Financial Services Podcast by Mobile-Financial.com available in iTunes.  This podcast is part of a series of interviews that Mobile-Financial.com conducts with leaders and experts within the mobile financial services industry.  To access the podcast, please click here.  If you have any questions about the podcast or interview, please send an email to:  contactus@mobile-financial.com.