While émigrés currently make use of cash transfer shops like those operated by Western Union in order to send funds back to family and friends in their home countries, eServGlobal reckons its HomeSend solution will make such shops a thing of the past.
With 13 offices around the world, eServGlobal provides full end-to-end and “any account to any account” mobile money services and international remittance services. Its HomeSend solution is a mobile-centric international remittance hub providing money transfer services to, so far, more than 300 million subscribers.
People can simply use the service to send electronic money between mobile phones and the HomeSend system allows them to convert that e-money to cash once it has been received to the phone. A small commission is charged that is then split between eServ and its partners
The HomeSend system comes out of a longstanding partnership between eServ and BICS (Belgacom International Carrier Services), which takes advantage of eServ’s technological expertise in mobile money and BICS’s global hub infrastructure that manages roaming clearance and settlement for more than 250 mobile operators around the world.
So far, two multinational operator groups have signed group-level contracts with eServ to roll out the system to their affiliates. “The big focus for us right now is to get as many of the biggest mobile operators worldwide as possible to sign up to use HomeSend as their main hub,” Craig Halliday, eServ’s chief executive officer, told Proactive Investors when we spoke to him last week.
EServ is continuing to sign deals for its HomeSend service. As well as announcing its results last week, the firm also announced a deal between BICS and Wafacash (a subisidary of Attijariwafa Bank Group) to enable Homesend users to remit money to their family and friends in Morocco.
Of course, mobile money transfer services are not the exclusive preserve of eServe (although the firm is seeking to protect 65 pieces of intellectual property covering how its technology makes use of ordinary mobile phone networks to enable money transfer). Smart phones are capable of hosting similar money transfer services, but Halliday does not see this as a problem since people in poor countries are still using ordinary mobile phones.
“There is going to be very, very low penetration of smartphones in markets like Pakistan for quite some time,” said Halliday, who points out that even if there was a significant take up of smartphones in developing countries the smartphone approach is more expensive than eServGlobal’s solution.
In its final results last week, eServe reported that revenue for the year to June 30 was A$42.8 million. This was down on the A$78 million reported for 2010 due to the sale to Oracle of eServ’s Universal Service Platform – which provides pre-paid charging, voucher management and recharge applications to the communications industry.
The firm’s operating loss (on the adjusted EBITDA level and not including the gain on its disposal of USP nor interest income) was A$4 million. Including the disposal and interest income, eServ made an EBITDA profit of A$52.2 million (2010: A$20.6 million loss).
On the adjusted EBITDA level, eServ produced a profit of A$3 million in the second half of the period compared with a loss of A$6.9 million in H1 2011.
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