Intele-Card NEWS Interview with
Cyphermint President and CEO Joe Barboza
As featured in Intele-Card NEWS November 2007
Q. What are some current trends in mobile payments right now?
A. Basically there are a group of companies working to move online banking to a mobile environment. Then there are companies like ours who are moving to provide other financial services into the mobile environment for the unbanked.
These services will allow them to pay their bills using mobile phones, as well as offer new card-deprived remittances in a mobile environment. The latest move is to take the card business and link it to the mobile network, because everyone sees cell phones as the mobile Internet.
Q. Where do you see the mobile payments industry headed over the next five years?
A. Over the next five years the industry will be focused on providing for the needs of the unbanked consumer—those that are the early adopters. So you will see things like bill payment, money transfer and P2P (peer to peer) so that people bidding on auctions can be in contact with the auction players, even when they are away from their office or home and they have their cell phone.
The other category is ticketing. The early adopters in mobile technology will be the high school/college students who all have cell phones. They’ll buy movie tickets and event tickets. The first m-commerce products will most likely by the impulse buy items—movie tickets, the latest DVD, the new CD. Then, when the older adopters come on board they’ll be looking for impulse items as well. The bank community can pay the banks on the computer at home. The chance of a bank consumer paying their bills on a cell phone is a lot lower than an unbanked consumer. But the banked consumer will send flowers, or they will order a pizza on the way home. Those are the types of products and functions we see as coming on board earlier.
Q. What are some international features of mobile payments?
A. People working in the United States who have bills to pay internationally can now pay those bills on their cell phones. We allow you to pay your mortgage through your cell phone internationally. We allow you to pay your utility bill down through South America and the Caribbean from your cell phone from here.
Internationally, there are places that are way ahead of us in usage. Ticketing is much more advanced; you can buy train tickets, or movie tickets on your cell phones. We are releasing that shortly here but it is already in play internationally. The ability to buy goods and services internationally is another plus. There are twice as many cell phones as there are computers. That means they’re twice as many consumers available to buy goods and services.
For more information on Cyphermint or PayCash Mobile, contact Joe Barboza, at 508-787-4810 or by email at jbarboza@cyphermint.com or visit PayCash Mobile at www.paycashmobile.com.
About Cyphermint, Inc.
Headquartered in Marlborough, Mass., Cyphermint is a provider of Global Electronic Cash Payment and E-commerce solutions. Cyphermint’s patented technology, PayCash, is used in three major areas: (1) The PayCash Mobile technology used by today’s web-enabled wireless devices (2) Kiosk Solutions - delivering web-enabled highly secure self-service B2C merchandising systems, and (3) PayCash Internet Payments providing un-banked consumers access to financial services such as Internet shopping, bill payment and debit cards. Cyphermint’s software solutions provide highly secure, highly scalable web-enabled transactional, services to merchants and consumers on the Internet, self-service kiosks and on cell phones, smart phones and Internet-capable PDAs.
