Telenity in talks with telcos for launching Pay4Me

Telenity, a provider of value added services, messaging and mobile marketing solutions, is in talks with leading service providers to launch Pay4Me, a value added service which caters to mobile subscribers who are low on prepaid balance and fail to make a voice call.
Yogesh Bijlani, country head and general manager, Asia Pacific, Telenity, said, "We are in talks with leading service providers for launching Pay4Me which is a VAS service to make life of subscribers who are on zero or low balance easy."
He added, "This service will give mobile subscribers who are on zero or low balance, and are not able to use their phone for anything else apart from receiving calls, the capability to make a voice call."
This VAS service allows mobile subscribers to make calls without the involvement of an operator through flexible and easy-to-use interfaces. The system provides multiple notification options for calling and called parties and supports subscriber list management options.
In this service an intended receiver of the call is asked to accept charges for the call made by his acquaintance who is low on balance and as result cannot complete a call from his cell phone.
For example, your driver who doesn't have the pre paid balance to give you a missed call so that you can call him back can use this service. He can dial a simple number (say *123*) and feed your number. You then receive a call that your driver wants to originate a call for which you will be billed. When you accept the request, the driver is able to call you and you pay for the call.
Bijlani further explained, "The USP of this VAS service is that it can act as a revenue churner for operators who want to target subscribers who are on a zero or a low balance. Reports reveal that over 30 per cent of African subscribers are sitting on a zero balance and when it comes to India the figure is 20 per cent in the pre paid segment."
He added, "20 per cent is a substantial base for operators and simple mathematics can reveal the amount of revenue loss that operators would be incurring from this base. For this subscriber segment, even killer VAS applications such as caller ring back tones are of no value because they rely on recharge of extremely low denominations and are perennially not able to originate a call."
Sharing his experience, Yogesh said, "Over the years, I have seen markets like Africa implementing such services highly effectively. Branded as Pay4Me, the service has seen some great success in prepaid markets like Africa. Etisalat generates 200,000 incoming requests for the service in a day and around 6 million requests in a month. A leading operator in Nigeria gets around 60-80 million requests in a month. In a nutshell, there are significant revenue generation opportunities from subscribers who are potentially dormant and inactive."