This from the epaynews site."Australian Firms Get Into GSM...

This from the epaynews site.
"Australian Firms Get Into GSM Prepaid Recharge
The Age
Dec 10 2003 : Three Australian firms, namely CommSecure, IT firm InterAcct and CRM solutions firm, Teletech, are marketing an over-the-air prepaid recharge service to the big five mobile operators, Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Hutchison and Virgin. The consortium believes mobile subscribers would take to using a GSM channel to purchase more airtime for their prepaid accounts. If the operators are amenable, the consortium is optimistic that a solution could be deployed by 1Q, 2004, allowing mobile users to top up their prepaid accounts by accessing an interactive voice response system and making a card payment.

Four out of five of Australia’s big mobile carriers are currently interested in the open-source, PIN-secured solution, according to Michael Lumsden, VP of TeleTech. To buy airtime over GSM, users only have to press four keys, said CommSecure’s Ray Loyzaga, and since no credit card or bank details are sent over the network, the solution provides a way to prevent the fraudulent use of credit cards in prepaid recharge. Using open-source software also enables the consortium to offer greater flexibility in devising four or five solutions and choose what is best suited to a client’s needs, Loyzaga added.

Vodafone Australia already enables its prepaid and postpaid subscribers to use a mobile banking application that allows customers of Commonwealth Bank (CBA) to access their accounts and pay bills from their mobile phones. Four years after releasing its mobile banking application, Vodafone will not disclose how many subscribers use it, but Commonwealth Bank’s manager of eCommerce, Marcus Judge, indicates that the customers using Vodafone’s service, “are doing about 12 transactions a month”.