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This huge and fast-growing market is in dire need of convenient and affordable options. m-Via has lined up a strong set of merchant partners that includes MasterCard and 7-Eleven and its model, which makes transactions free to users, should be appealing to this population.
November 30
Bill Barhydt is jet-lagged in an outdoor cafe when he texts an American Banker reporter a cent.
The chief executive of m-Via, a Palo Alto, Calif. start-up, has spent the past four years developing a low-cost mobile payments system and telling people around the world about it. He recently returned from Port-Au-Prince where he taught rebuilding villagers about m-Via and its new checking account called Boom.
m-Via rolled out Boom in November 2011. Since then, Barhydt has been traveling between Los Angeles, Mexico City and Miami promoting the technology.
This week, he's in the Big Apple talking to visiting Mexican dignitaries and associations of Latin American immigrants. Later this year, the company will launch an app for Google's (GOOG) Android mobile phone platform. That will allow Boom users more ways to access their funds. The company also plans to add remote deposit capture technology that will give members the ability to snap pictures of checks they want to deposit.
Today, Boom users can only load cash into their accounts at participating retailers such as 7-Eleven, at merchant associations and at Cardtronics' financial services kiosks.
"Most people operating in the mobile payments space aren't really solving a problem," says Barhydt, a New Jersey native who got an undergraduate computer science degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken and then went on to work at NASA, the CIA, Goldman Sachs (GS) and Netscape. "Migrating the growing cash-using [immigrant] middle-class consumer from cash to the banked world… that's the problem that we are trying to solve."
Boom moves money through text messaging.
m-Via's process starts when a user opens an account at a cost of $25 a year. Boom members can then move money outside the U.S. for free, sending relatives or friends in other countries cash through the system. m-Via works with CBW Bank of Weir, Kans., to open the accounts.
The pricing model includes three free monthly cash withdrawals. People also receive a Boom co-branded prepaid MasterCard.
The company is working with associations of overseas merchants, such as Diconsa, which is managed by the Mexican government, says Barhydt.
"That's a benefit that I could see if you are playing to that niche of people who need to move money [across borders],"says Nicole Sturgill, a research director in the retail banking and cards practice at CEB TowerGroup. The fees are going to be much higher if you are going through other companies, or even a bank, Sturgill says.
m-Via also acts as the processor of those transactions, and hedges against money laundering and fraud by creating transaction rules around the accounts that search for dubious payments.
As for Barhydt, he's not done with traveling and promoting his company just yet.
"I have been in Mexico and Haiti in the past week," he says. "I think I'm in a state of perpetual jet-lag."
