Metavante, Monitise Plan Mobile Payments System for North America

The joint venture to be established by Metavante and Monitise will enable consumers to rely on a common, intuitive and secure interface to initially check account balances, transfer funds between bank accounts and pay bills any time from the device they always have with them — the mobile phone.

“Metavante delivers banking and payment technologies to more than 8,600 financial services firms and business worldwide, including 91 of the top 100 U.S. banks,” said Alastair Lukies, chief executive officer and founder of Monitise. “By mobilizing their market reach as well as their breadth of capability -- ranging from their payments network, core processing, prepaid card platforms, e-banking and electronic bill presentment and payment -- we are creating an advanced system at a key stage in the evolution of payments innovation.”

The system will be built using similar principles to the award-winning Monilink platform in the U.K. Monilink is a joint venture between Monitise and LINK, the operators of the U.K.'s ATM infrastructure. The U.S. venture will enable mobile carriers, financial institutions, payment processors, payment networks and billers to provide innovative and intuitive financial services to consumers through a collaborative ecosystem. The Monitise mobile payment platform is a secure, scalable application that has been endorsed by the World Economic Forum as a pioneering technology.

“Metavante has been closely following the emergence of mobile technology as a key enabler of mobile payments innovation for the mass market,” said Frank D'Angelo, group president, Metavante Payment Solutions. “Monitise is a leader in the mobile banking and payments field, and it has a unique, proven capability to develop financial institution-grade, highly scalable environments. Mobile carriers and financial institutions of all sizes can re-use this existing infrastructure to provide simple and intuitive services to their customers with minimal complexity and up-front investment.”

Monitise solutions feature multi-layer security measures, including a two-factor authentication system that enables mobile phones to securely generate one-time pass codes. In addition to mobile payments, the Metavante-Monitise joint venture makes low-cost, two-factor authentication services available to U.S. and Canadian financial institutions through Monitise’s ACCODE service. ACCODE replaces hardware tokens and key fobs by enabling mobile phones to securely generate a One-Time Passcode for desktop, remote and portal access, along with point of sale and Web-based payments.

The solution provided by Metavante and Monitise brings together the key players from their respective industries and enables them to focus on their core competencies while benefiting from the economies of scale the larger system provides. Both parties have been in discussions with key potential participants in the platform, and they expect to launch the initial services to consumers later this year.

Metavante will provide hosting services for the Monitise mobile payments platform in the United States. As part of the hosting services, the NYCE Network will connect the Monitise platform to its switch. NYCE is a Metavante company and a leading U.S. electronic payments network providing consumers with secure, real-time access to their money, connecting the accounts of more than 74 million cards with 280,000 ATMs and 1.5 million point-of-sale locations nationwide.

“The alliance between NYCE and Monitise will establish two parts of a complete whole,” said Steve Rathgaber, president and chief operating officer at NYCE. “Monitise is uniquely suited to interface with the mobile side, where the transactions will be initiated, and NYCE will bring those transactions the rest of the way to the consumers’ accounts, over our own secure, reliable infrastructure.”