The World Bank estimates the volume of international remittances in 2009 at $320 billion and an estimated 390 million immigrants living away from their country of origin. With a global mobile subscription base estimated to be 5 billion (November 2010), there is a huge opportunity to enable airtime top-up exchanges.

Roamware's Social Top-Ups allows a person to directly “top up” a mobile subscriber's prepaid mobile phone in another country, as long as the recipient’s mobile network operator is a participating carrier in this service.

It is currently available to Facebook users who have set the United States (with English US as the language preference) or the United Kingdom (English UK as language preference) as their current profile locations. Payment is taken either via PayPal or any international credit card.

The service will gradually be rolled out to other countries and expanded to allow top-ups to be added to prepaid mobiles from other countries.

Social Top Ups is built using Global Airtime Top-up Exchange (GATE), a solution within the Macalla Platform. GATE enables subscribers send any network airtime to friends and family abroad via the Internet, SMS, POS or agent. The application is available at:
https://socialtopups.roamware.com (Facebook ID required)