InMobi has launched SmartPay, a global mobile payment service that will enable app developers, game companies, and content providers in the mobile content and virtual goods space to expand their business and monetize their users quickly by providing a one-time, no setup cost, single point of integration across multiple countries.
The solution offers consumers a seamless, pure mobile checkout experience using secure, direct to carrier billing to start, but expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of the year.
“Today’s mobile payment options are basic transaction pipelines and offer very little beyond providing transactional support. InMobi SmartPay™ is a ‘performance based’ payments platform that provides data and insights through an easy to use interface, which help merchants optimize conversion paths, product offering, and pricing to maximize their ROI. Developers can also track advertising performance from impression all the way through to conversion. The result is better ad targeting, higher conversion rates & better revenues.”
“InMobi SmartPay™ technology automatically recognizes the country, handset, operator and OS of the consumer and dynamically serves the buying path most likely to convert. With 4.2 million possible combinations, automating this task is a huge benefit to developers.”[blog]
InMobi’s SmartPay currently supports 7 countries (US, UK, Germany, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and South Africa) and plans to expand to 30 countries by end of this year.
Given that InMobi has witnessed phenomenal success in non-US markets, this seems to be the logical move by being more developer friendly and hence, be the pipe that enables transactions across platforms.
The road however isn’t going to be smooth for the team, as there are multiple options (for payment plus there is quite a mafia everywhere) and integrating payment systems across different countries will entail its own friction.
Of course, if this succeeds, InMobi will be a super awesome acquisition target.
What’s your take?