While mobile top-up has a lot going for it, the fact remains that it has not caught on yet. We see several factors behind this:
While all major MPSPs above offer mobile top-up transactions, few are promoting it. Smartpay and YeePay are the only two that have paid much attention to top-ups, and both of them deal primarily with China Unicom, by far the smaller of China's two mobile operators. UMPay, a joint-venture between China Mobile and bank card network operator China UnionPay (and thus the best positioned of all MPSPs to work with China Mobile), has yet to show much interest in promoting mobile top-up to China Mobile's 225 million prepaid subscribers.
This is the fifth part of our Mobile Top-up and M-Payment Adoption in China series, following on from a post called How Top-up will Drive M-Payment Growth in China .
While mobile top-up has a lot going for it, the fact remains that it has not caught on yet. We see several factors behind this:
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While all major MPSPs above offer mobile top-up transactions, few are promoting it. Smartpay and YeePay are the only two that have paid much attention to top-ups, and both of them deal primarily with China Unicom, by far the smaller of China's two mobile operators. UMPay, a joint-venture between China Mobile and bank card network operator China UnionPay (and thus the best positioned of all MPSPs to work with China Mobile), has yet to show much interest in promoting mobile top-up to China Mobile's 225 million prepaid subscribers.
- Mobile top-up is among the cheapest of all transactions. Given current monthly ARPU of approximately RMB 50 for prepaid users, a single monthly top-up with a 3% transaction fee brings in RMB 1.50 for the MPSP. At such small amounts, MPSPs will not see any significant revenues until top-up transaction volumes are in the tens of millions per month. For this reason, many MPSPs are focusing instead on big-ticket items with higher commissions.
- As with most types of mobile payment, bank partnerships - critical in allowing as many mobile users as possible to register for m-payment - aren't always nationwide.
- Because mobile networks are managed primarily at the provincial and municipal levels, mobile top-up services often do not work outside one's home region.
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