Voice Commerce Selects Alcatel-Lucent Mobile Wallet Service

By Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet Contributor

Voice Commerce has selected Alcatel-Lucent's Mobile Wallet Service (MWS) to provide payment and mobile money services to mobile operators.

MWS places the mobile operator in the center of the emerging mobile payment equation. It makes use of an operator’s trusted network to deliver consumer applications such as person to person payment, remote ticketing, proximity payment and m-commerce, all aggregated onto a single MWS platform

With the capabilities enabled by this agreement, mobile service providers can now deliver fully regulated end-to-end financial services. Voice Commerce, which recently launched its Cashflows services, operates various financial services under licenses covering the provision of payments, e-money services and is a membership of both Visa EU and MasterCard. This offer is well suited to mobile service providers in emerging markets, claims Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert).

“Our goal is to provide a complete mobile money eco-system for the mobile operator,” said Anthony Belpaire, general manager of Alcatel-Lucent Mobile Wallet Service, in a press release. “For fast adoption of services across existing point-of-sale terminals, our customers need compliance with e-money licensing schemes and interoperability with global payment networks. Voice Commerce provides a unique market accelerator to make MWS a complete solution for mobile operators,” added Belpaire.

According to Gartner (News - Alert) Group, the market for electronic mobile wallet services is growing fast and it could reach $245 billion in value by 2014. Edgar, Dunn and Company predicts that mobile wallet users will reach 1.4 billion by 2015, says Alcatel-Lucent. As consumers are won over by the convenience, speed and security of paying by phone, mobile payments will be an area of significant growth over the next few years, the experts feel.

Recently, the company took plunge into the Web developer community through its latest acquisition. ProgrammableWeb is regarded as the technology industry's universal source for Web APIs (application programming interfaces). ProgrammableWeb's Web APIs are widely used by application developers to build web, mobile, and other connected applications that serve consumers and the workplace. Alcatel-Lucent has announced on the last week of June that it has acquired ProgrammableWeb.

(source: http://next-generation-communications.tmcnet.com/topics/nextgen-voice/articles/105204-voice-commerce-selects-alcatel-lucent-mobile-wallet-service.htm)