The next generation platform enhances the customer engagement experience that financial institutions and mobile operators can offer their end-users, by providing a complete set of rich features for mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile money services - on a single platform.

For financial institutions, the Sybase® mobile commerce platform enables banks to extend their relationship to both the retail and business customer through the mobile channel, and to create new services and improve customer loyalty. The rich set of mobile payment functionality supports mobile payments services that enable consumers to use their mobile devices to pay for real-world goods and services. This latest release adds mobile money capability to the platform for branchless banking, enabling financial institutions and operators to run financial inclusion services for the unbanked and under banked, turning the consumers mobile into a branch-in-their-pocket.

The Sybase mobile commerce platform has been architected to meet increasing demands as mobile commerce moves from a minor service to a mainstream service offered to a vast array of customers worldwide.

"Mobile commerce is evolving at a rapid pace in both developed and emerging markets, and as it moves into the mainstream it puts huge demands on existing mobile banking and payment services," said John Sims, President of Sybase 365. "Rather than dealing with thousands of customers and tens of transactions per seconds, you now need platforms that can scale to hundreds of millions of customers, and thousands of transactions per second. Our experience in building reliable and scalable systems that handle almost 2 billion mobile messages per day is at the core of this next generation platform."

The latest version of the Sybase mobile commerce platform also includes mobile CRM functionality for mobile marketing, customer engagement, surveys and voucher capabilities. These not only complement the overall mobile commerce services, but encourage customer loyalty and uptake of services.

The next generation Sybase 365 mobile commerce platform includes the following key features:

Single Platform for Mobile Commerce: Supports mobile banking, mobile payments (wallet and stored value accounts) and mobile money (for branchless banking). It also includes mobile CRM functionality to engage customers via mobile marketing, surveys and vouchers.

Scalable Platform based on OSGI architecture: Minimizes the need for downtime with support for hot deployments; reduces deployment and configuration complexity, and allowing running of multiple versions simultaneously.

Enhanced Reporting: Built-in support of Crystal Reports for rich operational reporting.

Advanced Customer Types and Fee Sets: Enables configuration of different customer types identifying them for specific use cases and fees based on rights and privileges, tailored to suit the need/type of customer Fee sets enable flexibility to configure fees at customer level, customer type level or organizational unit level.

Improved Customer Risk Category: Enables limits and velocity checks to be configured across individual customers, customer risk categories, or organizational units, further improving fraud management capabilities.

Operational Dashboard: A user-interface driven view into the operational and business aspects of the platform facilitating control, ease of management and maintenance for operations teams.

"Financial institutions must be prepared for sharp increases in the volume of mobile banking and payment transactions. As adoption and usage of mobile services increase, many financial institutions will find their customers routinely performing transactions via the mobile channel more often than any other," said Andy Schmidt, research director at CEB TowerGroup."

The next generation Sybase mobile commerce platform demonstrates Sybase 365's ongoing commitment to market leadership. The new platform is able to scale to meet the demands of deployments that range from small countries to some of the largest countries in the world.

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