The Redwood City, Calif., company is expected today to introduce a mobile payments system in Senegal, the latest in a string of marketing strategies the company has used — some more successful than others — to deliver its money-transfer technology.
Obopay is nothing if not inventive. It has aimed its person-to-person funds transfers directly to consumers. It has struck partnerships with Citigroup Inc. and MasterCard Inc. It's moved into India and Kenya. And last month it announced a new business model focused on selling its software to U.S. banks.
These efforts have had varying degrees of success, but the company says that each new marketing strategy has helped it further refine its business model.
Obopay is "building on their experiences," said Beth Robertson, the director of payments research for Javelin Strategy and Research. "They have a lot of initiatives in a lot of markets."
These initiatives demonstrate that developing a payments technology with plenty of potential is just the first step; vendors also need to figure out who might want to pay for it, and how to deliver it. Obopay's many ventures show the company continues to look for the right approach to define and target its customer base.
In expanding its African payments operation, Obopay is "leveraging aspects of our service that are in other markets," said David Schwartz, the transfer company's head of product and corporate marketing.
For the new service, Obopay is partnering with Societe Generale to launch a mobile transfer service in a nation where just 6% of the population has a bank account. The Senegalese model, in which Obopay's service is offered both with and without an attached bank account, can be exported to other countries in Africa. Obobay's system lets users send one another money through their phones.
This two-pronged approach builds on Obopay's experience in the U.S., where it works with banks, and its experience in Kenya, where it works with nonbank agents.
The Senegal service is called Yoban'tel by Obopay — a phrase in the local dialect Wolof that translates roughly as "send by mobile."
Schwartz said this model is a better fit for Senegal than its approach in the United States, where "we made the bank account the anchor of the transaction."
Obopay's U.S. model initially required a dedicated prepaid account to fund person-to-person mobile payments that are managed from a mobile phone. It later refined this model to allow users to fund transactions directly from bank accounts, after learning that users want to send and receive funds through their primary bank accounts.
In Senegal, Obopay is downplaying the ability to link to bank accounts; its service can be used without one, although it can draw funds from a Societe Generale account if the user has one.
Societe Generale says the partnership can help it win customers in the region who already know their brand but have never seen the appeal of working with a bank.
"They will not go to the bank to open a regular bank account — it's too much work for them," Jean-Michel Guillaumond, the head of research and development for Societe Generale's international retail banking division, said. "But the way we provide this service through a number of agents they know already," such as the satellite television provider Canalsat Horizons, "for them, it is easy."
Schwartz said those merchant locations "may be much more available to them than a bank branch."
