Serbian network operator Telenor has introduced a new mobile  payment service called PlatiMo. The  service allows customers to pay bills and perform other financial services via their mobile phones directly from their bank accounts.

The operator has selected an m-payment offering comprised of G&D’s SIM cards and SmartTrust Over-the-Air server software, and Halcom’s mobile payment system. Telenor has worked closely with the four banks involved—Komercijalna bank, Erste Bank, Credit Agricole and Raiffeisen Bank—to provide a state-of–the-art mobile payment system to their customers. These four banks as a group serve more than 50 percent of the Serbian market.

Telenor and the partner banks are currently are currently working to sign up merchants to the system. Telenor will soon be able to offer the option of paying utility bills for electricity, cable TV, water, Internet and other services through mobile payment. Moreover, Telenor and the partner banks are also aiming to expand mobile payments to ticketing, offering users the opportunity to pay for cinema, theater and concert tickets, taxi rides, and public transport.

Currently, subscribers using the PlatiMo application can pay mobile phone bills issued by Telenor, send money to other PlatiMo users, make online purchases, buy airplane tickets via the call center of Serbia’s largest national air company JAT Airways, and top up their prepaid accounts in the Telenor network.

After the promotional period, which ends in April, 2011, new banks will be introduced to the PlatiMo system, increasing the potential customer base.

What is more, thanks to cooperation with e-government, all PlatiMo users will have access to e-government services through the system and will be able to order personal documents, such as birth or citizenship certificates.

PlatiMo is simple-to-use, versatile and suitable for all commercially available mobile phones. It also meets the highest security standards for electronic payment transactions: The phones use special WPKI (Wireless Public Key Infrastructure) SIM cards from G&D, which provide an electronic certificate issued by the Halcom certificate agency. During the encrypted transactions, data are exchanged between the SIM card and a G&D SmartTrust Mobile Transaction Gateway server which is connected to PlatiMo’s four participating banks via Halcom’s 123 Pay! platform.

Consumers are protected in the event of cell phone loss or theft, since payments can only be made by entering a special additional PIN—the sPIN—which is different from the cell phone’s SIM PIN. Such security technology has been widely used in electronic banking for years and so far these systems have not seen any cases of misuse or fraud.

Source: Virtual Press Office (VPO)