Matthew Talbot over at Inside BlackBerry touches on more details around BBM Money.
International Airtime Gifting Through TransferTo
TransferTo is the leading provider of international airtime remittance. The service works with over 350 mobile operators in over 100 countries, and allows you to give prepaid mobile credit to your BBM contacts across borders or overseas. BBM will now integrate with the TransferTo airtime transfer service, meaning you can send airtime credit to BBM Contacts from within the BBM app.
Almost 80% of mobile users use prepaid minutes. Adding this feature to BBM will make it easier for people to make small value transfers among contacts, and share prepaid airtime so they can stay in touch with friends and family who live and work in other countries.
BBM Money: P2P Transfers, Mobile Top-Up, and Bill Pay
We’ve been piloting the mobile wallet service for customers with BlackBerry devices in Indonesia since early last year. We initially limited it to certain customers and certain kinds of transactions because we wanted to test the waters and get feedback. What we learned is that there’s a lot of excitement and interest in the service. We gathered enough data during the pilot to understand that people are ready for mobile payments.
Why Indonesia?
Indonesia presents a perfect marketplace for BBM Money. First, it’s no secret that we have a lot of customers there. It is the biggest BBM market globally. A massive number of Indonesians use BBM today, and the monthly active user count is growing by 150% annually. As I mentioned in my post about BBM for Windows Phone, handset manufacturers’ billboards around Jakarta advertise that that their phones are “BBM ready.” It’s a must-have in the Indonesian market.
Catch up on the full post at Inside BlackBerry
