LONDON, September 6 /PRNewswire/ -- The 2006 Frost & Sullivan Technology Leadership Award in the South African smart card market has been conferred on the South African mobile banking and transactions solutions company, Fundamo. The company's progressive solutions have enabled organisations to provide much needed mobile banking services across Africa and to international markets such as the Middle East, Latin America and the Asia Pacific. These countries, like South Africa have have limited access to banking services and often have a high growth potential. The award recognises Fundamo's innovative products, exceptional service support and overall technical excellence.
A global leader in the provision of these mobile banking services, Fundamo has very few competitors, partly because it offers an enabling service and unlike some of its closest competitors, is not seeking to compete with banks. A key contributor to Fundamo's success is the extensive set of best practices they offer to assist clients with the full project lifecycle to ensure successful business delivery. Success on these projects relies on more than reliable technology, it relies on a holistic approach which includes everything from business modelling and product design to the operations management in the long-term.
"Their products have extended the prospect of mobile banking to a larger number of South Africans and are enabling emerging markets in Africa and abroad to be amongst the most innovative when it comes to mobile banking," observes Frost & Sullivan Smart Card Analyst Lindsey McDonald. "Moreover, the time to market these products has been reduced because of the provision of high quality service support."
The company's comprehensive product range includes mobile solutions for corporates as well as more specific mobile banking and transactional solutions for individuals. While businesses are catered for through the provision of services such as airtime vending, bill collecting, business mobile banking and delivery payments, product offerings for individuals include services such as mobile banking, person-to-person payments, prepaid airtime purchases, bill payments and mobile authentication amongst others.
"Fundamo is distinguished by its ability to offer specific solutions as well as additional enablers that add value to its existing mainstream solutions and thereby allow clients to accomplish more," notes Ms. McDonald. "Clients are further supported by strong professional services that aid in the effective implementation of the company's solutions."
For instance, Fundamo provides additional channels that allows for the support of a variety of mobile technologies. Another example is multiple account support, which permits Fundamo's clients to operate more than one transactional account per customer. These enablers allow clients to provide additional services such as card issuing, transactional accounts and supplementary facilities such as shared platform support and reporting databases.
Technology excellence has underpinned the company's success. Its solutions can be deployed alongside various mobile technologies such as short message service (SMS),USSD, SIM Browser and interactive voice response (IVR) among others. Outstanding technical service support covers areas such as project management, product, technical and process specifications, technical installation, integration services, technical and business training and most importantly -product customisation to suit client needs.
"These services assist in allowing easy back-end and support office use, which enhances the experience of the end user," says Ms. McDonald. "Fundamo believes it is important to ensure effective knowledge transfer to clients and educate them on how to optimise the use of these new technology solutions even while allowing clients to apply their own branding and pricing models to them."
In partnership with leading global companies such as Gemalto and S1 and by becoming a part of the MasterCard Vendor Programme, Fundamo has achieved higher levels of recognition as a world leader in its field.
The Frost & Sullivan Award for Technology Leadership is bestowed each year upon the company that has demonstrated excellence in technology leadership within their industry. The company has excelled in all stages of the technology life cycle, ensuring a continuous flow of improvements and has, by innovating leading-edge concepts, pioneered client applications.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognise companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has been partnering with clients to support the development of innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth partnership services and corporate management training to identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, and the investment community, by providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. For more information, visit www.frost.com.
About Fundamo
Fundamo is a provider of a suite of mobile applications and business solutions for organisations wishing to do banking, payments and other transactions from mobile devices. These organisations include banks, mobile operators with banking aspirations and third party payment processors/switches. Fundamo targets international growth through quality business partnerships and resellers, including Gemplus, the global leader in the provision of smart cards, and global electronic funds transfer company S1. (formerly Mosaic Software).
Fundamo's suite of products enables person-to-person payments, payments for deliveries, airtime purchases, bill payments, retail payments, payments for virtual content, etc. The transactions offer immediacy, convenience, security, simplicity and affordability.
Fundamo has provided solutions and supporting services to customers in a number of countries with sizable customer bases and transactional volumes being processed on a daily basis. The company's customers processed well over 50 million payment transactions in 2005 and are experiencing significant month-on-month growth in their transaction volumes. Fundamo's major shareholders include Venfin and Sanlam.
For more information, please visit www.fundamo.com For further information please contact: Aletha Ling Fundamo Tel: +27-21-943-2200 Cell: +27-82-453-5314 Email: [email protected] Kristina Menzefricke Frost & Sullivan Promotions Manager, Best Practices Europe T: +44-(0)-207-343-8376 E: [email protected]
SOURCE Frost & Sullivan
CONTACT: For further information please contact: Aletha Ling, Fundamo, Tel: +27-21-943-2200, Cell: +27-82-453-5314, Email: [email protected]; Kristina Menzefricke, Frost & Sullivan, Promotions Manager, Best Practices Europe, T: +44-(0)-207-343-8376, E: [email protected]
