Where to learn about mobile payments

I live in Zimbabwe where paying online is a nightmare if not almost impossible. I have this idea of creating sites that use mobile banking facilities available in Zimbabwe. The thing is I do not have enough money to pay someone do a mediocre job for me. I want to do it myself. The problem is I do not know what to read or where to start. I am not good but ok in PHP and C and I need to be pointed in the right direction.
What I want the site to do is to accept payments, communicate with the appropriate servers, process the transaction and send an SMS to the customer.

 

what about buying prepaid by western union or money gram

 

I don't think I have a clue on how those things work. Thanks for pointing them out. Now I'll go and make some enquiry. I still want to learn how to handle mobile banking coz if I don't do it for my site I'll definitely need to do it for some clients. This is budding industry with immense potential in the third world.
Check it out here: http://www.techzim.co.zw/tag/ecocash

 

You may want to inquire with TN Bank to see if they offer a POS gateway for ecommerce platform. I am not aware of any mobile money POS gateways that integrate into ecommerce application (i.e Prestashop). If you build such an application you have to ensure security similar to bank wire transfer. Do you have a tech hub located in Tanzania? Try to find someone in IT or technology field to bounce your idea off of without fully disclosing what you're trying to do if you can to help you in the right direction. Best of luck in your endeavors.

 

I haven't inquired with TN but knowing my fellow Zimbabweans like I do there is a 99% chance that they haven't considered creating that sort of gateway yet. Maybe if I learn how to do it I may end up doing things for them and others. Do I need a degree to master this kind of technology?

 

Learning about Mobile or Online payments is not an easy task. There is so much information out there, that it sort of confuses the mind at time. Information overload is a very easy thing to achieve when trying to enter the domain of online and mobile payments. I don't know if you know about Quora (www.Quora.com) - which is an excellent place to learn. It is a Q&A site, but a lot more advance and better quality answers than say Yahoo! Answers. I recently put up an answer there, on a question that was "How Does The Payments Ecosystem Work?" You can view the answer here: http://www.quora.com/Payments/How-does-the-payments-ecosystem-work/answer/Faisal-Khan-1

Its a slow and steady task of learning online payments. You will have much questions and confusion, but best to have patience and read a lot.

 

It seems there's a lot to learn form both quora and paymentmagnates. Thank you guys. I hope the newsletters wont swamp my inbox and overwhelm me