Advanced Value-Added Services: Mobile Money Transfers
Carrier: CDMA
Technologies: J2ME CLDC 1.0/MIDP 1.0, J2EE, WSDL, SOAP, HTTP/HTTPS, SSL
Mobile Devices: Sanyo MM-8300 , Samsung A630, A580
Azoft is a sub-contractor for a partner company that is building all software infractructure for emerging U.S. Mobile Virtual Network Operator targeting the Hispanic community of the United States. This MVNO is going to launch a service plan that takes into account distinctive social and cultural features of the Hispanic community and offers a value-added service having no counterparts. It will be working in CDMA standard and based on Sprint Nextel network.
Azoft is one of the sub-contractors in a large project devoted to creation of a number of value-added services. This MVNO considers Hispanic population of the United States as its target audience. The value-added services are meant to take into account such characteristics of the above community, as strong family relations and large family size, large proportion of people with no bank accounts, close relations with relatives and friends in Latin America. The huge growth of subscribers base was anticipated and this was taken into account by Azoft while designing architecture and developing service.
The Azoft’s competence within this project is the development of mobile applications that will implement the functionality required for the value-added services, and application server, that serves mobile applications and provides web-services architecture for a number of external components such as web-portal and other underlying distributed resources and services.
Azoft has developed two major value-added services: Mobile Money Transfers and Account Management. The first is money transfer application and the second is family or group plan management.
Logical View
The Mobile Mone Transfers application allows subscribers to use the international money transfer service directly from the handset. Money transfers are empowered by the world’s largest money transfer operator. Subscriber can initiate money transfer from a handset if they have enough funds on their carrier account. The recipient can recieve money in any of operator locations by providing MTCN number and his ID On the one hand, this service is extremely simple and useful – it doesn’t require neither sender nor recipient to have a bank account, and the transfer is accomplished straight from the handset, on the other hand, despite its simplicity , this way of money transfer gives confidence because the money transfer itself is exercised through the major established company, that had signed an exclusive agreement with this MVNO.
Implementation View
The money transfer service is implemented by a UI rich mobile application, developed by Azoft, and is pre-installed on all the handsets which are part of the sign-up package. The application performs the user’s authorization – in order to make a transfer, the user is required to pass through strict sign-up process and to use application they have to provide 6-digit PIN-code on each application launch.
It allows for viewing the current account balance, and making a transfer, having entered the amount and recipients’ info, it allows for maintaining frequent recipients list and viewing the history of transfers as well. In case of wrong PIN-code the user has to answer 3 security questions. Both PIN-code and security questions are encrypted. Frequent recipient list allows user to simply select from the list rather than type in all over again recipient details.
The amount of transfer is controlled both locally (single transfer must not exceed $500) and by the remote modules from the money transfer operator. The user is notified about success of the transaction or its failure (in case of lack of funds on his amount, e.g.). If subscriber is currently out of coverage even then they can use the application but with limited access that limits functionality only to viewing recipients and transactions.
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