President Clinton opened the fourth Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting, bringing together nearly 60 current and former heads of state, five Nobel Peace Prize recipients, and hundreds of international CEOs, non-profit leaders, and major philanthropists to collaborate to make positive change in the world.
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WISekey committed to provide a platform to enable any individual with a mobile phone to conduct payments and transactions that are otherwise inaccessible, require traveling large distances, spending large amounts of time on bureaucratic procedures, or are excessively priced, whilst also enabling the development of or reinforcing existing communities through communication. WISeKey is seeking partners to develop and deploy the Mobile Payment Telco Platform and, due to the fact that it is necessarily a multidisciplinary initiative, the nature of the involvement of the partners can be of many types including political support, logistics support, policy declarations and changes, investments, collaboration with research teams (academic or in the private sector), in-kind contributions, and others.
The type of partners WISeKey is initially seeking are telecommunications companies, financial institutions, government departments, municipalities (or other government structure) seeking to provide improved services to their citizens, as well as funding agencies.
"Everyone who has come to CGI's Annual Meeting or is following it online has the power to make a difference," said President Clinton. "The commitments you will make this year-both at the meeting and on our web-portal MyCommitment.org-come at a time of great uncertainty for the world. This makes our collective ability to touch the lives of others more important than ever. Working together, we can help make a safer and more sustainable future."
Those participating in this Mega-Commitment:
- CGAP commits to fund pioneering m-banking initiatives, conduct market research, and convene regulators.
- Equity Bank commits to double the number of Kenyan citizens with mobile banking services.
- The GSMA Development Fund, with a grant from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, commits extend mobile financial services to 20 million new customers living under $2 a day.
- MPower Ventures commits to enable money transfers on mobile phones through prepaid debit cards.
- Tostan commits to expand access to mobile banking services in rural West African communities.
- Western Union commits to develop strategic alliances to introduce or support mobile-based initiatives for underserved communities in more than fifteen countries.
- WISeKey commits to provide a secure platform for mobile payments and transactions.
- Wizzit Bank commits to scale its mobile banking initiative from South Africa to 13 additional countries.
- Women's World Banking will study how microfinance institutions can employ mobile services.
WISeKey is committed to leading the development of a mobile payment infrastructure to enable a new approach to m-payments using local mobile operators and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) to provide services to upstream service providers and end-stream end-users by granting access to an " M-Payment Telco platform."
During the first two years the commitment aims to support a regional population of 427 million people in the Mediterranean region.
This will be divided in two areas: The population of the northern-rim nations will represent around 192 million and the population of the southern- and eastern-rim nations of 235 million which is the main target of the commitment due to the concentration of low-income communities.
We expect major milestones, particularly in rural areas, where access to financial services is limited. In the poor countries of the Mediterranean region a large proportion of the population are excluded from formal banking systems and make payments entirely using cash, which is far less secure and flexible than electronic payment mechanisms.
This commitment will enable over 20 million people in less than two years to start using the m-payment service that allows them to transfer money over at least the two major mobile networks in the region. This type of mobile-enabled financial services has the capability to bring advantages to all stakeholders:
For users: an opportunity to become engaged in the formal banking sector, to facilitate and reduce the costs of remittances, and to enable financial transactions without the costs and risks associated with the use of cash, including theft and travel to pay in person;
For operators: a significant increase in text messaging revenues and a large drop in customer churn
For consumers: m-commerce is more secure and flexible than cash, allowing consumers to make payments remotely
For banks: an increase in their customer reach and the added cash float available to the bank
For retailers: added business opportunities through the sale of prepaid account credits
For micro-finance institutions: the ability to advance funds into remote areas and have regular repayments that do not significantly inconvenience the user
For service industries and utilities: the ability to get payments electronically from a significant portion of the overall population
The M-Payment Telco platform would predominantly be used to distribute third-party services such as cash transactions, mobile applications, mobile-Services, information and advertisement.
In order for upstream and downstream users of the M-Payment Telco Platform to connect to each other in an efficient manner, WISeKey is seeking to introduce the concept of the e-Identity in the Mobile world. The WISeKey e-Identity can reside on the SIM of the phone, be embedded in an application, be associated with an online authentication mechanism or other innovative approach that can be enabled through WISeKey´s technologies. The end-customer will be able to set his profile and connect to upstream sought-for value-added services, by uniquely and easily identifying their self with the e-Identity. The e-Identity technology will also allow the upstream providers to target very specific user groups. An example can be the notification of travelers when their plane or train is delayed. Of course, the public transport operator wants only to notify the right persons, and looks for more cost efficient ways when sending an sms. Other applications can be targeted advertising, government services, loyalty points management, physical access control linked to the eID, etc.
WISeKey's M-Payment Telco Platform technical solutions would enable the following functionalities:
- M-banking
- M-payments
- M-cash
- Mobile digital signatures
- M-egovernment
The combination of these elements would also facilitate the creation of a new initiative WISeKey is embarking on called " WISeCities" which focuses on the creation of high-tech services as part of the infrastructure of cities that open completely new models for interaction among the persons in cities as well as between the public and private sectors. As an example, the deployment of a wireless infrastructure enables new services to persons on the go, be they government services or private sector services. These types of WISeCities projects accelerate the deployment of M-Banking applications among citizens. WISekey and Microsoft already have concrete deployment cases as the one just concluded with the Biscayan Local Government (north part of Spain) connecting 2 million citizens.
This new Mobile Payment Telco Platform commitment goes in line with the previous commitment announced by WISeKey to expand the use of Digital Identification with the aim of increasing digital connectivity and secure transaction services. The partners aim to include 1 billion users by 2015.