The Nation: What is your business target?

Komsan: We set a target for the end of this year to have 10 per cent of Advanced Info Service subscribers as mPAY users. [AIS currently has nearly 17 million subscribers].

We're not being too ambitious. There are currently about three million "heavy" users of the MobileLife portal, a group of users open to new technologies.

We have confidence our services are beneficial to customers.

In the future, there will be more variety of services. Customers can re-check their mPAY transactions anytime from a website.

There will be more utility firms joining in, as well as credit card, insurance and leasing companies.

Among them are TT&T, True, Aeon, etc.

Our target this year is to increase the number of our "strategic merchant partners" to 40 from 15 at present.

We also plan to set up more vending machines where users can use their mobile phones to buy drinks and food in place of coins.

In Germany they have already be-gun an m-payment service on public buses.

I heard the Bangkok Metropolitan Transit Authority is going to bring in 2,000 buses for a trial of contactless tickets, similar to those currently being used in Bangkok's subway.

We expect to introduce NFC [near-field communication] technology in the fourth quarter that will allow mobile phones to work as a contactless tickets.

You put in some designated codes and your pin number on the handset, wave the phone at a sensor and then it pays for the ticket fare.

Are you convinced people would like to use the NFC-enabled handsets?

At present some may think there should not be many people who would use them.

But there are millions of them used in Japan now because there are many mobile phone and mass transit users in Japan.

In June I will fly to Japan to study in detail the plan to introduce NFC service in Thailand.

Today, NTT Docomo [mPAY's joint-venture partner] has about five million m-payment users, out of its 48 million subscribers, after launching a full-fledged service 18 months ago.

We have been in talks with Thai Smart Card [a subsidiary of CP Seven Eleven] to share investment in NFC reader equipment.

This is to avoid duplicated investment, the same concept as the banks which share their credit-card terminals.

During the next one or two months, the banks' tie-ins will be our key success factor.

We're also changing the "payment pattern" into a single step. Up till now we have been using an IVR [interactive voice response] system which means users have to listen to automated advice and go through step by step to finish one transaction.

The new system will allow the user to punch in a set of designated codes, push a call button, and that's it.

Can users be sure that their m-payments are secure?

mPAY helps users save both of time and money.

For the aspect of security, we have high confidence since we have made an initial investment of Bt150 million for a software system [Encorus] which is the same standard banks use.

So far we have not found any problems or errors.

If money is deducted from a customer's account erroneously, we will know it first.

For instance, there were customers who double paid their monthly utility bills.

Our self-assessment system found it, cancelled the second transaction and sent an SMS to the customers to inform them of the incident.

M-payment has been a flop in Europe. Why do you think it will succeed here?

The financial system in Europe is well established and it does not have a high population density.

Conversely, in Asia, m-payment is quite popular. Besides Japan, Globe Telecom in the Philippines introduced the service six months earlier than we did and now 10 per cent of its 14 million customers have an m-payment account.

In Indonesia, a telecom firm which has 23 million customers started the m-payment system at the same time as us and they now have 900,000 customers.

In Indonesia, they can even use mobile phones to transfer money across the border.

Is mPAY also aiming for general offline shops?

It might be easier if you simply use your credit card or cash to pay for the goods.

However, the delivery sector is interesting. mPAY can ease cash management and make sure they receive money from a customer's order.

What is your advertisement and promotion budget?

We set an Bt80 million budget this year.

During March to May when we aired the TV commercial "Zomby", there were 1.5 million calls to us inquiring about the mPAY service.

The first part of this interview was published on Monday, June 19.