Motorola M-wallet - from Payments News

A Motorola press release this morning contains more details on the M-Wallet:

Motorola Helps Subscribers Leave Their Wallets at Home

New solution makes it simple to pay bills, conduct money transfers and complete point-of-sale purchases with your mobile phone

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill.- 08 Feb. 2006 - Paying bills on time, transferring money to a friend in the same or different country, or making a purchase at a retail store just got easier with Motorola’s (NYSE: MOT) M-Wallet Solution, announced today. Motorola’s M-Wallet features an easy-to-use mobile interface that gives the consumer quick access to the financial world virtually anywhere, anytime, in a secure and convenient way—eliminating the need to carry a credit or debit card in your wallet.

Motorola’s M-Wallet also addresses the needs of companies that wish to innovatively market their goods and services. For example, merchants can issue virtual loyalty or gift cards directly to their customer’s mobile phone. These cards can be redeemed via a mobile phone or can allow customers to conduct secure point-of-sale transactions, collect loyalty point, and obtain store receipts at existing retail merchant locations. M-Wallet users must opt-in to receive coupons or other promotional services, allowing them to choose preferred merchants who participate in the program and thereby reducing spam.

“Mobile phones are no longer just about conducting conversations, they are now emerging as a center of people’s lives for every day transactions,” said Navin Mehta, Motorola’s vice president of Applications Management. “With M-Wallet, Motorola continues to offer industry leading applications that not only bring convenience and flexibility to subscribers but help operators differentiate and advance their portfolios to increase mobile data usage.”

This enhanced value is provided in several ways. For example, when the M- Wallet solution is deployed within Motorola’s scalable Global Applications Management Architecture (GAMA) service delivery and content management architecture, operators can more proactively manage and extend the merchant value chain. Because the merchant community and end users alike can securely and consistently access the network to conduct safe transactions, the infrastructure provides operators with the rich retail ecosystem necessary for delivering and promoting new applications - a key to growing average revenue per user over time and enhancing end-user experiences. In addition, operators also can take advantage of Motorola’s application hosting services to minimize deployment time and more rapidly bring the benefits of this solution to end users.

Motorola’s M-Wallet is network and device agnostic and works with GSM, CDMA, or iDEN® technologies, and is compatible with Symbian, PocketPC, Palm, J2ME, Brew and SimTk. The solution consists of two components: first, M-Wallet is the application that consumers and merchants download from the Internet; second, the Wallet Service Center allows the operator to manage administration, registration, issuance of credit and debit cards, coupons, archiving, customer profiles and maintenance. It ensures end-to-end security throughout the platform and all of a user’s banking and credit information is stored with their financial institution.