Alaric, a global supplier of fraud prevention and payments solutions, announced today that it has partnered with Mistral Mobile to enable financial institutions around the world to offer customers full financial services through mobile phones - going far beyond most mobile services available today.
The joint offering will use Mistral Mobile's Money Mobility Suite for the interface with the mobile devices, supported by Alaric's Authentic solution for transaction processing. This provides a proven, scalable foundation for the mobile offering, enabling it to deliver a reliable, dependable service as volumes grow. The solution addresses the cost and infrastructure challenges of previous implementations, without the need for mobile data connections or partnerships with mobile operators. The service is technology agnostic, so it can be used by any customer with any mobile phone.
The partnership between Mistral Mobile and Alaric means that service providers can offer their service to everyone in the market, and they have the ability to update and add new features completely remotely and automatically, with no need for customer involvement in application updates. The system can connect to banks, card schemes and other payment schemes, and has the flexibility to be integrated into the wider banking system. The mobile solution will also integrate with Alaric's Fractals fraud prevention technology, giving financial institutions the ability to detect and prevent merchant or micro-agent fraud.
Ludwig Schulze, CEO, from Mistral Mobile said, "While there are mobile payment schemes in place today, many of them are monolithic solutions that can't be configured to allow new innovations to be delivered to the customer quickly, and are also highly dependent either on the mobile operators, or customers having advanced smartphones. By partnering with Alaric, we can offer Mistral Mobile's knowledge of the mobile arena, with Alaric's flexible, configurable payment processing engine, to sit at the heart of our mobile financial services offering, which allows us to reach and serve everyone in a market."
"There are approximately 2.5 billion under-banked people in the world today. Where there are high levels of unbanked, there are also very limited bank branch nch networks. There is demand among these people for basic banking services especially as they become more affluent, and mobile technology provides an obvious answer. We have taken careful account of the practicalities of delivering mobile payments, including the limitations of prepaid accounts and low 3G penetration in the target market, and Mistral Mobile provides the ideal solution," said Mike Alford, CEO at Alaric.
This partnership expands the work that Alaric has done in the mobile POS acceptance space, allowing retailers to use their phone or tablet to accept card payments, instead of a dedicated POS terminal.
Authentic is a modern, ultra high-performance EFT authorisation and routing system managing transactions from all channels across the enterprise from ATM and POS to ecommerce and mobile. Unlike conventional payments processing software, Authentic absorbs change with ease. It combines unrivalled flexibility of deployment with efficiency of processing. Providing the payments engine for global networks and large processors, Authentic has achieved in excess of ten thousand transactions per second in recent benchmark tests.
Fractals is an intelligent fraud detection and prevention framework suitable for PSPs, online merchants, card issuers, acquirers and payments processors. When used 'in-flight' illegal transactions can be detected and stopped before a transaction is completed. Proprietary mathematical models incorporate self-learning allowing the model to automatically adapt to new fraud trends and retain its effectiveness. The Fractals Rules Engine enables fraud analysts to create and deploy powerful fraud detection rules within minutes, delivering substantial reductions in fraud losses. In the rapidly evolving world of electronic payments, Fractals benefits from continuous investment and R&D, ensuring that it remains at the forefront of fraud detection.