Elephant Talk Communications, Inc., an international provider of business software and services to the telecommunications and financial services industry, is all set to become a pro in virtual mobile network operations.

More cell phone companies are increasingly outsourcing their networks' back offices to virtual network enablers to offer their own mobile services. New research from Wireless Intelligence shows that the number of virtual mobile network operators around the world has increased to more than 600. This number is also believed to increase in the coming years.

Elephant Talk Communications provides this new technology required to run mobile networks, both for existing mobile phone companies and for other companies that want to offer their own mobile services.

Elephant Talk believes that its big advantage is that its software platform is one integrated system. Moreover, it owns the source code for all the underlying software systems, which enables the company to make changes to a network in less than a few hours. 

'We have the most sophisticated, fully integrated platform, which bypasses the spaghetti of most mobile operators,' Steven van der Velden, chief executive officer at Elephant Talk said.

Elephant Talk's virtual mobile network is open for any company, from a bank to a supermarket. Using Elephant Talk's platform and space purchased from a telecom carrier's physical network, a cable company could offer mobile phone service, or a government agency could bundle all their employees into a single cell phone plan, which would even include saving money by billing all international calls as local calls. 

'We have this relentless drive to empower our customers with mobile plans that fit the needs of their clientele,' van der Velden added.

Not only this, but the company says that networks can now come with some added features. One example of such customized services is credit card fraud detection. Elephant Talk subsidiary ValidSoft has developed software that instantly checks to see if a credit card transaction is legitimate. That's just the beginning, however. The credit card fraud detection system 'is our first customized mobile service,' says van der Velden. 'We hope it will grow to another dozen.' 

Mentioning about voice prints, a system that identifies cell phone users through the distinctive sound and pattern of their voices, Elephant Talk's official believe that this system to enable secure access to sensitive information like bank accounts, doctors to monitor their patients over mobile networks, or allow people to control their home energy use from their mobile handsets.

Elephant Talk's official expects the company to be at the forefront of this trend.