Mobile operators are tying up with financial institutions for mobile payment systems, because they want a separate wallet; if the money is shown in their books, then it will add to the license fees the operator pays to the government - typically around 10 to 12 percent. Which is why Harish Gandhi of Canaan Partners, formerly the head of Value Added Services with Bharti Airtel, includes financial institutions as an integral part of the mobile commerce ecosystem. Responding to another question about how seriously operators are treating m-commerce, Gandhi mentioned that Airtel has exclusive teams looking at m-commerce - bill payments, travel and ticketing, remote payments. “It’s profitable to be in this space. The value-add of the operator is that he already has relationships (billing, I presume) with the customer. The credit card has smaller, limited customer set. The operator also brings in a retail infrastructure of 5-6 lakh retailers.” Responding to my query about Pre-paid versus Post-paid systems of payment, Akshay Sharma, AVP Marketing and Business Development for mobile payments co Paymate said that it’s too early for that to be decided - whether debit card based, credit card based, or cash top-ups or bank account based. Sachin Bhatia, co-founder of MakeMyTrip felt that the addition of more players to the value chain - the operators and technology providers is not going to impact the cost-to-consumer. It will be borne by the service provider, in the hope that there are more transactions overall.

Gandhi believes that Mobile Internet transactions are not likely to take off in a big way because of issues of accessing the Internet on the mobile. The other barrier: the state of mobile networks might impede growth, and transactions might not mature. The mobile operators will have to deliver on that: we need to build an ecosystem.