Kyivstar Smart-Hroshi: What This Mobile Money Service Was
Kyivstar sent me a promotional email about their Smart-Hroshi service (the name means “Smart Money”).
The offer: until the end of the year, top up Vodafone and lifecell numbers from your Kyivstar mobile account with a promotional fee of just 0.5%. The name sounds promising, so I decided to take a look.
Why bother if you have a bank in your phone?
My first thought was: why install some app and put money on your mobile account when there’s monobank (referral link)? That question stayed with me the whole time I was looking at the service.
On Google Play, the Smart-Hroshi app is rated 2.5 stars. That rating already says enough to stop here, but let’s dig a little deeper :-)
What the service can do
From the description: it’s an app for easy and secure payments from your mobile account (prepaid Kyivstar subscribers only) and from payment cards issued by any Ukrainian bank. It claims more than a thousand services you can pay for, in categories like these:
Of the services I saw, some I’d never heard of, and the rest can be paid with a bank card, usually without a fee. I still don’t get what the point is. Maybe someone uses something from this list and finds it convenient to do it from Smart-Hroshi? Or does Kyivstar want to build its own PayPal?
Then again, the more services, the better for the user: more competition means better quality and lower prices. As they say, every product has its buyer.
Personally, I like cats, and I don’t see any in Smart-Hroshi, so the choice is obvious for me :-) (monobank’s mascot is a cat.)
If you use Smart-Hroshi, please tell us in the comments what for and why. Maybe other people need it too, and we just don’t know about it.
Update (August 2022)
The service no longer exists. In an interview with Interfax-Ukraine on August 5, 2022, Kyivstar president Oleksandr Komarov said the operator was shutting down its mobile financial services because it saw no major prospects in them. The joint project with Alfa-Bank, which issued the e-money for Smart-Hroshi, has been closed completely. For payments and transfers from your phone, a regular banking app is the way to go.