Simpay

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SimPay is a consortium which was founded to promote Mobile Payment but which is being closed as of June 24, 2005.

In February 2003, T-Mobile, Orange, and Vodafone formed a new Mobile Payment Services Association (MPSA) with the goal to deliver an open, interoperable and commonly branded solution for payments via mobile phones, designed to work across all operator networks. In June 2003 the consortium re-branded itself as SimPay.

In February 2005, Amena and Proximus joined the consortium. Several other European operators (Elisa, Mobilkom, Optimus, SFR, Telia, H3G, Debitel, KPN, O2) have also expressed an interest to join SimPay.

Simpay planned to create a pan-european framework whereby merchants and content resellers would be able to charge for products and services directly to a subscriber's bill.

In June 2005, Simpay decided, "following the decision of one of its founding Members not to launch Simpay for the foreseeable future, [...] not to pursue its activity on a pan-European scale as originally planned." All activities were put on hold effective June 24, 2005.

Organizations like Bango which were working with Simpay established multiple bi-lateral agreements and now provide similar services - across many more mobile operators.

The UK Simpay founders started work in 2005 on a project called "Payforit" which was launched in 2007 to provide similar services in the UK.