The payment initiative builds upon the success of Alternet's mobile commerce subsidiary Utiba Americas, a joint venture with Singapore-based, leading mobile financial services solution provider, Utiba. Utiba Americas is Utiba's affiliate for the Americas region, and offers the leading Utiba end to end mobile financial service solution as a hosted service and as a traditional software license. Since its launch in the Americas region in 2010, the company has implemented mobile financial service solutions in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala, with further implementations under way in Venezuela, Honduras and Mexico. Utiba Americas and Utiba expect to be present in 14 countries in the Americas including the United States and Canada by the end of 2013, serving a potential market of over 600 million mobile and internet users and a population of over 900 million people.

Utiba recently announced a strategy to allow payments between traditional debit, prepaid and credit cards and mobile wallets, in an initiative they have named Converging Payments. Alternet intends to work closely with Utiba on card processing and program management service offerings to complement this strategy, to provide an end to end solution. The suite of services, expected to be commercially available by the end of the second quarter of 2012, will target financial institutions, program managers, consumer goods manufacturers, governments, traditional and online merchants, and social media networks.

"Utiba's success in mobile financial services and visionary approach to Converging Payments provides Alternet with an opportunity to expand in the explosive and rapidly evolving mobile payments market, which was recently projected to reach $998 billion in 2016," commented Henryk Dabrowski, CEO of Alternet Systems.