Tune Money-Celcom Card to be introduced regionally

KUALA LUMPUR: Tune Money Sdn Bhd plans to market the soon-to-be-introduced Tune Money-Celcom Card, Malaysia’s first mobile-enabled Visa card service, in neighbouring countries next year.

The company has targeted between 500,000 and one million new customers for its upcoming prepaid Visa card services by end-2008.

Its chief operating officer Kaneswaran Avili said the Tune Money-Celcom card, to be launched in December, would be offered to Celcom’s existing 6.4 million mobile subscribers nationwide including its high-end postpaid customers.

“It is like taking mobile commerce to a bigger scale. We will announce details (of the launch) towards the end of the year but it will be the most reasonably priced product in the market,” he told reporters yesterday after the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Tune Money and Celcom (Malaysia) Bhd for Malaysia’s first mobile-enabled Visa card service.

Tune Money’s chief executive officer Tengku Zafrul Aziz said it plans to introduce the Tune Money-Celcom Card in neighbouring countries next year.

“We are looking into Indonesia (and planning to launch) by the first quarter of next year,” he said, and added that it would expand its card business into Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore by the first half of next year.

He said the features of the card include domestic and international remittances, fund transfers, bill payments and mobile reloads. He added that customers would be able to transfer money via simple mobile phone-to-mobile phone transactions besides withdrawing cash from automatic teller machine network with the Visa Plus mark.

Celcom’s chief executive officer Datuk Seri Shazalli Ramly said the Visa prepaid card would be linked to the over 115,000 Visa merchant outlets nationwide. He said the Visa card project would have a positive impact on Celcom’s subscriber base next year.

Celcom’s senior vice president for corporate strategy and development, Azwan Khan Osman Khan, said the company would spend some RM5 million to RM10 million in working capital including producing the prepaid cards and setting up the electronic mobile payment systems.