Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Multi-currency in mobile payments: What does it mean?

Many vendors claim that they support multi-currency in their mobile payment/banking solutions. After giving it some thought, I was not sure what this mean. Or to put it differently, I am sure it means something different for different platforms.

I believe multi-currency support can be grouped under one of the following categories (arranged in degree of sophistication):

  • No Multi-currency
  • Different currency for different deployments. A specific deployment can be initialised with any of the supported currencies.
  • The platform supports currency conversion transactions from one currency to another. This is implemented for transactions originating or terminating external to the mobile banking platform.
  • Full support for multi-wallets with different currency, full multi-currency conversion during real-time transactions, with clearing and settlement capabilities.
It is clear that multi-currency can mean different things to different people.

No comments: