This week sees Mobile World Congress (MWC) – one of the year’s biggest and most important events in the technology industry – taking place in Barcelona, Spain.

Asian influence at the show is usually in the form of Japanese, Chinese and Korean firms like LG, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Huawei et al. Southeast Asia and Thailand barely gets a look in. This year however, the GSMA – the association for the global mobile industry – has highlighted Thai operator True as showing the potential of mobile banking.

The latest mobile money case study from the GSMA is focused on the True Money service, details from the GSMA’s mobile money website are below.

Launched in 2005, True Money is now used by 6 million customers. The system processes over USD$900 million in electronic payments and 120 million transactions per year. This doesn’t match the US$3.5 billion in P2P payments [Kenyan service] M-PESA processes per year, but it does suggest that the model has gained some traction.

What’s most interesting is just how unique True’s approach has been. Whereas M-PESA has scaled remarkably well as a money transfer offering, True Money has gained its traction as a payments offering. That is, their scratch cards, e-wallet and 8,000 ‘True Money Express’ agents form the basis of a system designed to process True Group bill payments, 3rd party bills, and prepaid bills from niche issuers.

True Money and M-PESA differ in many ways, but are both success stories in their own right. Indeed, True’s success to date vividly illustrates how market conditions, customer needs, and operator assets shape the nature of the mobile money opportunity in every market.

With much of the population priced out of traditional fixed internet through a computer, mobile is the primary internet access point for much of Asia.

The figures and numbers behind the service are impressive too.

As such services like True Money have huge potential for revolutionising Asian (and Thai) banking in a way that the west has been trying to force for a number of years with wireless wallets, contactless payment systems and other innovative payment services.

For further reading see ‘The Rise of Mobile Money in Asia’ from the GSMA mobile money website, this Business Day article from MWC and this article from The Nation dated September 2009.

The case study slides as presented at this year’s Mobile World Congress can be found here.

True Money Case Study –