Tuesday, July 18, 2006

PayForIt report - 160 Characters

WAP/Mobile Internet: mBlox Ready For PayForIt

Submitted by Mike Grenville on Mon, 17 Jul 2006 11:41

Ready to go live in the Autumn of 2006, mBlox claims to be the first company to announce its successful accreditation on Vodafone and Orange to the new UK mobile internet billing scheme PayForIt.

The PayForIt scheme, run by all the UK mobile operators, will mean that consumers can buy content with their mobile phones just by clicking on a "Pay" button on a WAP page. It will offer an easier buying process with better consumer protection than existing methods of buying from a WAP page using premium SMS. Premium SMS content purchases were worth over £500m in the UK in 2005, and with the increasing use of the mobile internet, PayForIt is expected to grow the mobile content market considerably.

The PayForIt scheme protects consumers by ensuring that crucial interactions with the customer regarding the purchase are not handled by the content provider, but instead by a trusted intermediary company, known as an accredited payment intermediary. Companies will no longer be permitted to process WAP or mobile internet billing transactions if they are not accredited.

mBlox is one of a small handful of companies who have now successfully achieved accreditation on Vodafone and Orange. This means that mBlox has demonstrated the highest levels of integrity, security and reliability in its operations, earning it the right to process some of the first mobile internet transactions in the UK when the scheme goes fully live in Autumn 2006. The other operators have not launched their accreditation process yet that is expected to begin within the next two months.

Last month, it was announced that mBlox had made a major investment in technology from carrier systems vendor Valista, which will be used to deliver the UK PayForIt service and similar services around the globe.

"We are enthusiastic supporters of PayForIt" said Andrew Bud, mBlox Executive Chairman (pictured). "Our major investment in this new technology will offer our customers the same seamless, international solution for mobile internet payments that they currently use for premium SMS services. We think that PayForIt, with its greater transparency and improved security, will earn consumer confidence and power new growth in this market."

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