BARCELONA, Spain--A pilot project between Syniverse and MasterCard to ensure mobile users' credit card transactions will be enabled no matter where they travel is part of Syniverse's broader plan to become an aggregator of contextual information that links brands and mobile customers to the benefit of their mutual customers.
During the Mobile World Congress trade show here, Syniverse and MasterCard announced the pilot phase of an opt-in service that would require users have their mobile device switched on where they are before they could also use their payment card for a purchase while abroad. The service would not only prevent transactions from being declined unnecessarily when a user travels to another country but would also keep payment cards from being used without the owner's permission, the companies said.
Under the program, mobile users will also be offered various prepaid data packages they can purchase directly from their phones when they arrive in their destination country.
MasterCard and Syniverse said their collaboration could enable future applications, such as targeted location-based marketing. Economists at SEEC have calculated that the market for such services would be worth $44 billion in 2017.
According to Sam Brown, founder and CEO of SEEC, mobile marketing suffers from a "poorly scaling bilateral market."
Similarly, Syniverse CMO Mary Clark said brands cannot achieve scale by forming 1:1 mobile relationships with individual customers. On the other hand, bringing mobile operators to the table will generate the scale needed to make bring contextual mobile advertising to the mass market.
Syniverse's contextual service offering could also be used to enable mobile banking on a widespread basis, extending peer-to-peer money transfers beyond the unbanked and less-developed markets.
She added that Syniverse is in "very advanced conversations with mobile operators" regarding its vision for enabling mobile context capabilities.
For more:
- see this Syniverse release and this release
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