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Alcatel-Lucent offers mobile operators the ability
to deliver payment, advertising, loyalty and coupon services to consumers and
merchants
Paris, 16 November 2009 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE:
ALU) announced today a collaboration between its venture, touchatag and
Clear2Pay, a leading worldwide payment solutions provider to create a mobile
payment framework for mobile operators. This framework will allow users to
purchase products, buy tickets or transfer money using their mobile phone. For
example, by placing a Near Field Communications (NFC) enabled mobile phone over
scanners at a point-of-sale terminal, a user can use his phone as a wallet.
This partnership addresses the specific needs of mobile operators that seek
to offer innovative new ways for businesses to market their goods and services.
The capabilities of the mobile phone, RFID, SMS, Web 2.0 services, and location
information, combined with payment, allow merchants to enhance their customer
relationships with virtual loyalty cards, coupons, tickets and membership IDs
delivered directly to a user’s mobile phone.
Through this co-operative effort, Clear2Pay and touchatag have created a
payment and stored value account (SVA) solution that will allow merchants to
enjoy fast point-of-sale transactions, collection and redemption of loyalty
points, issuance of gift cards, delivery of electronic store receipts,
interactive advertising and promotions as well as enhanced customer
relationship management analytics. Users gain the benefit of easy payments and
checking transactions and balances in real time on their mobile phone. In
addition, users can manage many relationships with merchants, banks, and
day-to-day applications without adding single use cards to their physical
wallet. Initially, the relationship will focus on delivering
proximity/contactless payment using RFID stickers and tags and evolve to NFC
enabled mobile phones. In the future, the same platform will deliver remittance
payments, person to person payment services and SMS ticketing.
The touchatag venture, will market the solution to mobile operators and is
providing identity management and contactless application management via its
Application Correlation Server (ACS). The group will also operate Clear2Pay’s
stored value account (SVA) server for micro-payments. Clear2Pay operates
ClearPark ™, a gateway to 3rd party payment providers and will
continue to address the needs of financial institutions and the payment
community.
Michel Akkermans, Chairman and CEO at Clear2Pay comments: “We are happy that
a leading telecom player such as Alcatel-Lucent selects our technology for
stored value in order to offer customer facing payment solutions to their
customers. In these challenging times, the market is looking for profitable and
secure mobile solutions which have true business potential. We are confident
that with this alliance we will be able to offer just that.”
“People want to user their phones to pay for everyday items. Clear2Pay’s
knowledge of the financial world and touchatag’s experience in mobile
networking are combined to allow people to use their phones for a wide variety
of payments options,” said Anthony Belpaire, General Manager of the touchatag
venture. “In linking Clear2Pay’s global payment gateway with touchatag’s
identification management services, we have an end-to-end solution for mobile
operators.”
The companies will be demonstrating the payment framework at the Cartes
trade show in Paris, from 17 to 19 November, at booth 3G018.
About Clear2Pay
Clear2Pay is an innovative financial technology company focused on delivering
globally applicable solutions for secure, timely electronic payments.
Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, the company facilitates banks and financial
organisations in their provision of payments services. Clear2Pay's technology
helps to reduce transactions processing costs, and to deliver new, compelling
payment services in a competitive way. Clear2Pay's payment solutions offer
organisations easy, branded ways for their customers to pay online: from
complex trade-supporting business-to-business environments, through e-commerce
applications, to retail payments and remittance services. Functions embrace
payments origination, reporting, linkage with back-office processing systems,
clearing, netting and settlement. Clients include global and major regional
financial institutions such as ING, Banco Santander, Crédit Agricole, VISA,
MasterCard, ABN AMRO, Nordea, Abbey National, Fortis Bank, ANZ and Commonwealth
Bank. Clear2Pay operates out of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Poland,
Spain, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, China, Malaysia and Singapore
and currently employs over 450 staff. More information is available on  www.clear2pay.com.
About Alcatel-Lucent Ventures
Alcatel-Lucent Ventures is a strategic investment group within the
communications industry. The team’s investment strategy has three key aspects,
incubation and commercialization of internal ventures, strategic venture
capital investment and joint ventures. touchatag is an on-line service that
includes a catalogue of contactless services, readers and tags that enable
network operators and enterprises to invoke payments, loyalty and coupon
services using, RFID/NFC technology. touchatag utilizes a managed services
approach to bundling multiple applications onto one contactless card.
Developers and enterprises can create new applications using the touchatag
API.
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