Russia’s three leading mobile operators, Megafon, MTS and Vimpelcom, announced last week they will provide their subscribers with full common access to their respective mobile payment systems.
Over the last two years, Russian mobile operators have developed and diversified their mobile payment systems far beyond traditional premium SMS. The ‘Easy Payment’ of MTS, ‘Mobile Payment’ and ‘Ruru’ of Vimpelcom, as well as ‘Mobile Payments’ of Megafon, have become popular means of paying for a wide range of services – from mobile and fixed line telephone bills to cable TV, utilities, air and train tickets as well as goods from some e-commerce sites – using mobile phones.
‘Easy Payment’ and ‘Ruru’, the most important payment systems, are already open beyond the respective subscriber bases of MTS and Vimpelcom. They are accessible to any bank card holder and can be replenished from the corresponding bank account. However, to date, a Vimpelcom subscriber could not open or replenish an ‘Easy Payment’ account using his or her Vimpelcom mobile account, and vice versa.
While the technical requirements for merchants will be standardized, the operators expect that their alliance will stimulate more mobile payments by making them more convenient to users.
But the alliance includes neither Scartel, Russia’s leading WiMAX provider operating under the Yota brand, nor Tele2 Russia, the subsidiary of the Swedish group serving more than 20 million mobile subscribers in Russia, which have developed their own mobile payment systems.
