Peter Erskine, Chief Executive Officer of mmO2 commented in a recent mmO2 press release announcing their third quarter customer numbers, "Across the footprint, our business continues to experience underlying growth. While market conditions are highly competitive, by delivering innovative products and services such as the Postbank initiative in the Netherlands. mmO2 continues to focus on profitable customer growth. *

When reporting the growth in customer numbers, the mmO2 media centre highlights the following as a key point; Innovative mobile banking product helps to achieve over 50 per cent growth of customer base in the Netherlands. It then goes into further detail; In the Netherlands, Telfort benefited greatly from its innovative mobile banking partnership with Postbank, adding 439,000 new customers (425,000 pre-pay and 14,000 post-pay), a growth of 52.3 per cent over the previous quarter. 376,000 of these customers came from this partnership and brings Telforts total active customer base to 1.3 million. *

The success of this programme shows the power of mCommerce to enable customer acquisition, retention and loyalty for operators. commented Niall O Cleirigh, Chief Executive Officer, Macalla Software. One of the keys to continued growth for mobile operators is to establish new types of partnerships between themselves and financial services organisations delivering secure interactive products that service customers requirements for convenience.

Powering this programme, The Macalla Mobility Platform (Mobility) combines both secure mPayments using SMS messaging and secure interactive banking using WAP. SMS is being used to trigger and fulfil call credit prepaid top-up. For example; a customer is alerted by Telfort that their call credit is depleting towards a pre-defined threshold, using the hot button facility on the pre-configured mobile phone the customer inputs the amount by which to increase the call credit. An encrypted SMS message is automatically triggered and Mobility then launches a series of secure instructions between Postbanks and Telforts enterprise systems, authenticating the customer within Postbank and Telfort, verifying the customer has sufficient funds, debiting the customers bank account, and crediting the customers account within Telfort, thereby completing the call credit top-up. For ease of use, customers can use the same M-code (PIN number) for login, authorisation and call credit top-up. The secure interactive banking services delivers the ability to pay bills, transfer funds, check account balances and stock information.

Press queries to:

Sarah Flynn
Director of Marketing
Macalla Software
Tel: + 353 1 664 2240
Mailto:[email protected]

About Macalla Software

Macalla Software is Europes leading mobile eCommerce platform provider to the finance and telecoms sectors.

Macallas flagship software product, The Macalla Mobility Platform (Mobility), provides a next-generation software platform for the sourcing and consistent delivery of transactional and payment services across Wireless, Internet, Voice and Interactive Digital TV channels.

Mobility provides multi device, channel and protocol support, including support for PDAs, pocket PCs, SMS, WAP phones, I-Mode phones, GPRS and 3-G devices, Pagers, PC browsers, IDTV set-top boxes. Mobility leverages Macallas core XML, Java, Internet technologies and professional services capabilities, thus providing a secure, scalable and consistent mobile eCommerce platform.

Macalla Software, founded in 1998 and based in Dublin, was recently named as Europes number one wireless technology provider. Macalla conducts its business globally via offices in London, New York, Madrid, Rotterdam and Frankfurt, as well as through an extensive partner network around the world. Alliances include Baltimore Technologies, BEA, CMG, eServ, Getronics IBM, KPMG, Nokia, Openwave, Sun and Reuters. Macallas customers globally include retail banks, investment banks, broker firms and telecoms companies. www.macalla.com