Serbia goes PlatiMo with comprehensive mobile payment service
Monday, 21 February 2011 11:11 | James Barton
A new payment service has been introduced in Serbia by the network operator Telenor. Named PlatiMo, the service allows customers to pay their bills and perform other financial services via their mobile phones directly from their bank accounts.
The operator has selected an m-payment offering comprised of G&D’s SIM cards and SmartTrust Over-the-Air server software, and Halcom’s mobile payment system. Telenor has worked closely with the four banks involved - Komercijalna bank, Erste Bank, Credit Agricole and Raiffeisen Bank - to provide a state-of–the-art mobile payment scheme to their customers. These four banks between them serve more than 50 percent of the Serbian market.
Telenor and the partner banks are currently in discussions with merchants and are eager for them to join the scheme as quickly as possible. Telenor will soon be able to offer the option of paying utility bills for electricity, cable TV, water, Internet etc. through mobile payment. Moreover, Telenor and the partner banks are also aiming to extend the scheme into the area of ticketing, offering users the opportunity to pay for cinema, theatre and concert tickets, taxi rides, and public transport.
Currently, subscribers using the PlatiMo application can pay mobile phone bills issued by Telenor, send money to other PlatiMo users, make online purchases, buy airplane tickets via the call centre of Serbia's largest national air company JAT Airways, and top up their prepaid accounts in the Telenor network.
After the promotional period, which ends in April, new banks will be introduced to the PlatiMo system, increasing the potential customer base.
What is more, thanks to cooperation with e-government, all PlatiMo users will have access to e-government services through the scheme and will be able to order personal documents, such as birth or citizenship certificates.
PlatiMo is simple to use, versatile and suitable for all commercially available mobile phones. It also meets the highest security standards for electronic payment transactions: The phones use special WPKI (Wireless Public Key Infrastructure) SIM cards from G&D, which provide an electronic certificate issued by the Halcom certificate agency. During the encrypted transactions, data are exchanged between the SIM card and a G&D SmartTrust Mobile Transaction Gateway server which is connected to PlatiMo’s four participating banks via Halcom’s 123 Pay! platform.
Consumers are protected in the event of cell phone loss or theft, since payments can only be made by entering a special additional PIN – the sPIN – which is different from the cell phone’s SIM PIN. Such security technology has been widely used in electronic banking for years and so far these systems have not seen any cases of misuse or fraud.
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