Most existing electronic payment services are offered by a single entity or a closed group of entities to a limited clientele. The failure of most of these services is programmed at birth already, as this closed concept does not allow growth and market penetration, does not allow reaching a critical mass. When electronic payment will mature there will only be a handful of services on the market with universal, wide scope, not a huge number of small, specified services. The network effect is critical in this business, which can only be realized through openness and cooperation.

The SEMOPS service is built on cooperation. It was realized early on that a successful electronic/ mobile payment service needs to assure the cooperation between banks and mobile operators. There were too many attempts on either side to capture the business alone without the participation of the other party, but they all failed.

Also it was seen that within each sector wide collaboration is needed, one or a couple of active players cannot serve the market. If participation is limited to a couple of players then huge segments of the population will be left out, the service cannot reach its universal scope.

The SEMOPS service aims to establish this wide cooperation along the lines of real financial benefits. It is obvious that the banking sector has different operating specifics from those ones the mobile communication sector operates. It is possible to elaborate a service structure, where these specifics are combined in a way that results in operating optimum, in terms of efficiency.  In the SEMOPS service banks are processing macro and mini payments, while MNOs are processing micro transactions. This division of work results in substantial cost reduction, risk reduction, utilisation of a common back-end infrastructure and great market coverage.

The involvement of a number of the banks and MNOs further increases the market coverage by enabling transactions between any of their clients either on the customer or on the merchant side.

Cooperation is not without consensus and some sacrifice. However it is important to see, that while earlier electronic and mobile payment solutions were trying to re-allocate the payment pie between established and new parties, the SEMOPS service, with the new transaction types, also increases the pie to such an extent that reallocation will probably not even be necessary, actors can concentrate on the new opportunities.