Planet Multimedia reports that as of today Rabobank launches its Minitix product. This is an e-mail electronic money wallet just like Way2Pay from ING and like Paypal. So users load the wallet and use a pay-button on websites to pay merchants. The product aims at payments up to 10 euro (max value in the wallet is 100 euro) and is designed to solve future payment problems in the mobile telecom-domain (the 3G environments).
The product features are well designed; users may choose to define their own risk barriers. Standard setting is that all payments need to be validated by a password of the user (having pressed the Pay-button). But the user can also choose to set a limit of for example 5 euro. This means that all payment below 5 euro will be immediately paid without further authentication asked.
Given that the margins asked by Minitix from m-merchants will be considerably lower than those asked by telecom-operators, it appears there is a rather gloomy future for the current telecom issuers of e-money. Also, those regulators/scientists that are worried about insufficient innovation might want to reconsider their assessments.
Needless to say that I immediately signed up and was pleasantly surprised with the seamless opening procedure.
