• Trivnet in Exclusive Negotiation for Transfer of Ownership
   
• A Beginner's Guide to Mobile Money
   
• Valimo and Trivnet to Introduce Enhanced Mobile Security
   
• Telefonica Selects Trivnet to Provide Mobile Financial Services...
   
• Trivnet Expands in LATAM ...
   
• Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Consumer Mobile Applications...
   
• Amdocs Hosts Event to Introduce Open Innovation...
   
• Amdocs Partners With Trivnet Enabling Service Providers...
   
• Good Scaling on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 ...
   
• Trivnet Announcing Commercial Availability of Int'l Mobile Remittance ...

Trivnet in Exclusive Negotiation for Transfer of Ownership

Netanya, July 22, 2010 - Trivnet, provider of the most powerful transaction management platform for delivering secured Mobile Financial Services (MFS), including Mobile Wallet services, confirmed today that it has received a binding offer to be acquired by a third party. Closing of a transaction is subject to shareholder and customary approvals, which are expected in the next 8 weeks.

Trivnet has become one of the leading players in the growing Mobile Financial Services space, enabling mobile payments, mobile commerce, mobile wallet "banking the unbanked", and mobile money transfer. Trivnet has offices in Israel, India, Spain and Latin America.

Trivnet’s management has confirmed the anticipated acquisition and clarified that Trivnet will continue operating as a separate company vis-à-vis its customers. "Trivnet is proud to be considered as one of the top leaders in Mobile Financial Services," commented Amit Mattatia, CEO of Trivnet. "With a growing number of deployments in all main territories and the strategic partnerships we have built, we certainly deserve this position."

A Beginner's Guide to Mobile Money

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “Money often costs too much.” Certainly banking and money transfer services often seem inveterately overpriced and are completely inaccessible to huge numbers of people in the developing world. Mobile money has the potential to change all that, not to mention how we pay for goods in the developed world.

Mobile money covers a range of financial services offered through mobile phones. These services can include 1) person-to-person transfer of funds, including remittances 2) using the phone to pay for goods and services, and 3) mobile banking. The majority of mobile money services require both a financial institution like a bank or credit card company and a mobile carrier to deliver a mobile money service to consumers.

Mobile Money in the Developing World

So far mobile money has had a larger impact in the developing than the developed world, in particular in the case of mobile transfers. The reasons are simple. Many people do not have bank accounts or easy access to a bank branch, especially in rural areas, and carrying larger amounts of cash is considered insecure.

By 2012, the number of people with mobile phones but without bank accounts is estimated to grow from 1 to 1.7 billion. Mobile transfers are cheaper and more accessible than bank transfers or, in the case of unbanked people, alternative methods like Western Union. The GSMA (the global trade group for the mobile industry) forecasts that the 'formal', i.e. tracked,  global remittance market could grow from around US$230 billion today to over US$1 trillion in five years with the help of mobile services.  In some developing countries, an informal economy of pre-paid minutes has already arisen where subscribers transfer pre-paid minutes to each other as an alternative to cash. In developing countries, mobile money services are often supported by a distribution system of agents, often small retailers.

In Kenya the pioneering M-PESA service performs mobile transfers for 6 million customers. FSD Kenya found that four out of five M-PESA users believe that losing access to M-PESA’s services would have a “large negative impact” on their lives. Users view M-PESA as faster (98%), more convenient (97%), and more secure (98%) than alternative methods to send or receive money. There were some downsides. M-PESA's users are often men working in the cities and sending money to their wives. Since starting to use M-PESA, the husbands make fewer trips home making some wives worried that their  husbands would find "city wives".

One of the biggest vendors of mobile money technology in the developing world is Fundamo. Fundamo launched a mobile banking service in Pakistan 8 months ago in cooperation with MCB bank which has 5 million accounts. The services included mobile transfers between accounts, mobile top-up and paying utility bills. Initially mobile top-ups were the most popular service but now mobile transfers have passed them by.

One remarkable fact about this service was that the daily limit for mobile transfers is 100K rupees (soon to rise to 1 million) while the ATM daily limit is 25K rupees. MCB's head of mobile banking Mazahir Ali Sayeed, told me that the mobile transfer behaviour is also very different from normal banking. Customers make 3-4 times as many transfers via the phone as they make bank transfers and the amounts are often lower. There are spikes in transfer transactions before morning prayers in the morning and after 8pm. Customers start to use cash less often.

Normally a new banking channel like Internet is introduced by a bank to save money or retain existing customers. The mobile banking service at MCB has actually pulled in new customers since currently all participants need to have a bank account with MCB. Due to the success of the service, MCB now plans to introduce a mobile wallet (an application in a SIM card which authenticates the user and may store some cash credit) which does not require a bank account.

I asked both Fundamo and MCB what they see as the greatest obstacles to expanding the mobile money market in the developing world.  Mazahir Ali Sayeed told me that customers need to be educated in how to use the service. Fundamo's Chief Business Development Officer, Aletha Ling,  saw the establishment of a distribution network of trusted local agents, as close to the community the better, as the most important issue. They both see a trend towards more interoperability so that for example,  a customer from carrier/bank A can make payments to customer from carrier/bank  B.

Mobile Money in the Developed World

In the developed world, mobile money services tend to revolve around mobile banking and mobile payments. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 3% of all American mobile users will be using mobile payments and that figure rises to 3.8% in Asia-Pacific. Mobile payment services generally start off with smaller payments for  mobile-related products before being extended to other kinds of products. Travel applications like public transport are also popular, in particular in Asia.

For mobile payments, one promising technology is NFC (Near Field Communication) which allows you to swipe your phone past a contactless point of sale to make a payment. NFC is a short-range communication technology similar to Bluetooth. A credit or debit card card application on the SIM processes pin authorisations and makes the payment. This kind of contactless technology (mainly using Sony's FeliCa technology) is already quite widespread in Japan where it is available in 60 million handsets. Nice is about become France's first "NFC city". However, NFC handsets have yet to appear in any numbers and payment methods designed for the mobile Internet like Paypal mobile are gaining ground in the meantime. Such applications, unlike NFC, don't require any special hardware.

I talked to Amit Mattatia, CEO of Trivnet (a leading mobile financial services vendor) about the status of the mobile money market in the developed world. He sees the first wave of mobile payments happening already via the app stores from Apple, Google and Nokia. He thinks that NFC as a technology will become more common in the mid-term and may eventually replace a credit card for certain types of purchases, in particular with teenagers who are too young to have a credit card. In common with Fundamo, Trivnet sees interoperability as an important objective for the industry and Mr Mattatia's prediction for the next big trend in mobile money is that payments will extend from content and mobile-related goods to physical goods.

The Future of Mobile Money

One signal that mobile money is about to become a serious market is that Western Union (currently the dominant player in global remittances) now has a mobile division, and has projects ongoing with several carriers in Asia. Nokia is currently piloting Nokia Money in India, targeting consumers with mobile phones but no bank accounts. Nokia Money services will be based upon the Obopay platform which performs mobile transfers across different handset brands, banks and mobile networks.

Throw into the mix mobile payment startups like Square, which allows physical credit card payments to be taken via a mobile phone, or Zong which links your phone account to a credit or debit card, and it looks like are we living in very interesting times indeed for the mobile money market. Whether it's saving a mobile subscriber in the developing world a long journey to a bank  or letting me buy a metro ticket with my phone, mobile money is one technology which can really make an impact on everyday life.
 

Posted on: May 5, 2010 

http://ciara-byrne.typepad.com/ceo_seeks_startup/2010/05/a-beginners-guide-to-mobile-money-.html

Telefonica Selects Trivnet to Provide Mobile Financial Services in Latin America

Madrid, Tel Aviv: February 10, 2010, Telefónica, one of the world's leaders in the telecommunications sector, and Trivnet, provider of the most powerful transaction management platform for delivering secured Mobile Financial Services (MFS), announced today that Trivnet has been selected to provide MFS to Telefonica’s Movistar customers in Latin America. A wide range of services, including person-to-person mobile money transfer, mobile commerce, bill payment and mobile banking will be offered. 

“We chose Trivnet as our provider of Mobile Financial Services based on their superior technology and expertise,” commented Jaime Grau, Transactional Business Director at Telefónica Latinoamérica. “We also wanted to work with a partner which understands the unique characteristics of Latin America. Trivnet proved their capability to work closely with us to create the optimal MFS ecosystem which includes banking, merchant, government agency and bill payment partners.” 

“Trivnet is proud to support Telefonica in its Latin American rollout of Mobile Financial Services,” commented Amit Mattatia, CEO of Trivnet. “We are reinforcing our leadership position as a global supplier to both emerging and developed market MFS, as proven within the Telefonica Group and in previous European and Latin American deployments outside of this group. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to provide access to much needed MFS to a greater number of people“. 

STAMFORD, Conn., November 18, 2009 — Gartner, Inc. has identified the top 10 consumer mobile applications for 2012. Gartner listed applications based on their impact on consumers and industry players, considering revenue, loyalty, business model, consumer value and estimated market penetration.

“Consumer mobile applications and services are no longer the prerogative of mobile carriers,” said Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner. “The increasing consumer interest in smartphones, the participation of Internet players in the mobile space, and the emergence of application stores and cross-industry services are reducing the dominance of mobile carriers. Each player will influence how the application is delivered and experienced by consumers, who ultimately vote with their attention and spending power.”

“The ultimate competition between industry players is for control of the ‘ecosystem’ and user experience, and the owner of the ecosystem will benefit the most in terms of revenue and user loyalty,” Ms. Shen said. “We predict that most users will use no more than five mobile applications at a time and most future opportunities will come from niche market ‘killer applications’.”

The top 10 consumer mobile applications in 2012 will include:

No. 1: Money Transfer
This service allows people to send money to others using Short Message Service (SMS). Its lower costs, faster speed and convenience compared with traditional transfer services have strong appeal to users in developing markets, and most services signed up several million users within their first year. However, challenges do exist in both regulatory and operational risks. Because of the fast growth of mobile money transfer, regulators in many markets are piling in to investigate the impact on consumer costs, security, fraud and money laundering. On the operational side, market conditions vary, as do the local resources of service providers, so providers need different market strategies when entering a new territory.

No. 6: Mobile Payment
Mobile payment usually serves three purposes. First, it is a way of making payment when few alternatives are available. Second, it is an extension of online payment for easy access and convenience. Third, it is an additional factor of authentication for enhanced security. Mobile payment made Gartner’s top 10 list because of the number of parties it affects — including mobile carriers, banks, merchants, device vendors, regulators and consumers — and the rising interest from both developing and developed markets. Because of the many choices of technologies and business models, as well as regulatory requirements and local conditions, mobile payment will be a highly fragmented market. There will not be standard practices of deployment, so parties will need to find a working solution on a case-by-case basis.

The entire article:

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1230413

ST. LOUIS and MENLO PARK, California - October 12, 2009 - Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), the leading provider of customer experience systems, today unveiled a new program called Open Innovation at an event held in Silicon Valley. Open Innovation's goal is to foster new ideas and collaboration between Amdocs and startup companies in the communications industry. The program also benefits Amdocs' customers—many of whom are the world's leading service providers—by providing a forum for innovation as service providers address business and technology challenges as the industry evolves.
The Open Innovation program consists of three areas:

• Amdocs Ascend! – A startup partnership program focused on creating new solutions by combining external innovation with Amdocs products and services. Amdocs seeks to develop partnerships that complement the Amdocs CES (customer experience systems) portfolio.
• Amdocs Engage! – A business development program promoting business opportunities between Amdocs, service providers and startup companies, through which Amdocs offers selected companies a discussion channel with its global customer base.
• Amdocs Venture – A program focused on investments in carefully selected startups. Today, Amdocs has announced two minority investments: Amobee Media Systems, a provider of telco- grade mobile ad server solutions, and Trivnet, a company that delivers mobile-based transaction management capabilities.

At the Amdocs hosted event taking place today, venture capitalists and startups will hear from Amdocs executives about the marketplace's most pressing needs and areas for potential partnership. In addition, attendees will learn how to participate in the program and how they can benefit from Amdocs' global expertise.

While Amdocs is announcing the Open Innovation program today, it holds long-standing relationships with the startup community. Currently, there are more than 100 startup companies participating in the program, with a range of focus from customer experience optimization and mobile applications, to television/ converged platforms and applications

Quick-to-deploy offering allows mobile service providers to capitalize on a range of financial services which cross borders and networks, delivered over the mobile phone

BARCELONA, June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), the leading provider of customer experience systems, announced today the availability of the Amdocs Mobile Money Hub, a SaaS (Software as a Service)-based solution for enabling service providers to support any payment or banking process over the mobile phone in real time. Partnering with leading enabler of mobile money services - Trivnet, the Amdocs Mobile Money Hub combines technology from Trivnet with Amdocs' implementation and integration expertise and data center facilities around the world.

"In today's digital lifestyle, it's a natural extension to utilize the mobile handset for financial transactions. The key is to ensure the user experience is positive and the underlying infrastructure supports such transactions in a totally secured fashion," saidMichael Couture, head of Global Marketing at Amdocs. "With the Amdocs Mobile Money Hub, service providers can now differentiate their offering and capitalize on the mobile money services market potential, at a low risk and at a low initial upfront investment."

The Amdocs Mobile Money Hub is powered by Trivnet's TRIV Platform(TM). The Trivnet technology allows service providers to offer their customers the ability to perform various financial transactions, such as money transfers, mobile commerce, and mobile banking, from all types of mobile phones, as well as over the Web, IVR (interactive voice response) or any other access method available to customers. Services are conducted in a fully secured environment, allowing service providers to adhere to the strictest financial and security standards and regulations, including ISO 8583, Know-Your-Customer (KYC), and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML).

 The Amdocs Mobile Money Hub is connected to global banking partners that provide the necessary foreign exchanges and inter-bank settlement services for cross-border money transfers. "Together with Amdocs we are offerings one of the leading mobile money solutions available on the market today to allow mobile service providers a quick and easy entry into the lucrative field of mobile financial services," said Amit Mattatia, president and chief executive officer at Trivnet. "The direct connection to cross-border and cross-network sources and destinations for money transfers will play a major role in driving service uptake and subsequent growth in the mobile money ecosystem."

The Amdocs Mobile Money Hub can be rapidly deployed. The underlying scalability of the solution allows service providers to readily add subscribers, services, and cross-border affiliations serving as cash in/cash out points, and support growing transaction volumes under an attractive, pay-as-you-grow, SaaS pricing structure. All services carry the service provider's brand, are configured to the provider's requirements and are localized to the finest details.

A recent example I have seen is of Trivnet's multi-service mobile payments platform, TRIV Platform™ version 3.1.1, which has recently been benchmarked on an 8 cores (64 virtual processors, 1.2GHz, 32GB RAM) Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server. This power efficient single CPU machine has successfully handled 520 transactions per second (TPS), which was high above the expectations, but the main point is the way it scales.

Good scaling, with the ultimate target of linear scalability, means that in order to handle more load, you proportionally increase the utilization of the computing resources. When it is a 1:1 proportion, it is a perfect linear scalability. The T5220 has 64 virtual CPUs, so the key for gaining high throughput is good parallelism between application threads (or processes). Good parallelism is directly interpreted to being able to utilize all virtual processors.  TRIV 3.1.1 has been deployed on two application server (Weblogic 10.3) instances, running on the T5220 machine. Java 1.6.0_11 was used on Solaris 10 u5. The main significant tuning was using libumem as the allocation library, which allows thread parallel (native, not Java) memory allocation – the performance (throughput) gain was around 15%. The other one was increasing the young generation Java heap (NewRatio=2), as most of the allocations are very short lived, and full garbage collection is rarely needed. There is a significant improvement in GC performance (and parallelism) in Java 1.6.0.  We stopped at 520 TPS, when the loader machines became the bottleneck. And, remember that if needed (was not needed here), we can always split the machine into Solaris containers or LDOMs when horizontal scaling is preferred.

Posted on: Mar 15, 2009

http://blogs.sun.com/amith/entry/good_scaling_on_sun_sparc

Tel-Aviv and Barcelona, February 17 - Trivnet, a market leader in mobile payments and commerce solutions, today announced the commercial availability of its cross-network and cross-border mobile money transfer solution.The Trivnet solution consists of three building blocks, all based on the carrier grade TRIV Platform™: the Trivnet Mobile Wallet, the Trivnet Electronic Distribution module, and the Trivnet Business Management module. Trivnet has established partnerships and integrations with global telecom and banking players, to provide Mobile Network Operators with an end-to-end money transfer solution, including the possibility to benefit from Software as a Service (SaaS) schemes and share remittance fees.Amit Mattatia, President and CEO of Trivnet, said, during the last months we have seen a major increase in the interest of leading mobile network operators, in both developed and emerging markets, to offer mobile money transfer services. Trivnet has already deployed its mobile wallet at multiple operators worldwide and is now actively deploying domestic and international money transfer solutions at several locations. Concurrently, we have teamed up with global and regional service providers who are leveraging our best of breed technology, business know-how and banking partnerships to offer mobile money services to their customers. Trivnet will remain focused on providing mobile network operators with feature rich, high quality, secure and profitable mobile money solutions at an unbeatable time-to-market.Besides traditional mobile money services such as micropayments and mobile commerce, there is growing interest in person-to-person transfers, bill payment and mobile banking to both banked and un-banked subscribers, while coping with regulatory requirements. The Trivnet field-proven server-based mobile wallet provides end users with access to a wide variety of mobile money services, using multiple payment methods, via different mobile and non-mobile access methods.