724 Solutions Inc. Broadens Focus, Delivering Solutions for Mobile Operators
Company names first customers in the mobile operator space
Toronto, ON, and Austin, TX (October 22, 2001) - Leveraging its experience and expertise garnered in the financial services industry, 724 Solutions Inc. announced today that it has broadened its focus and formulated a strategy for helping mobile operators "monetize" transactions within their mobile networks.
In a related announcement today, Nortel Networks and 724 Solutions reported plans to jointly offer m-commerce offerings for mobile operators across the globe incorporating 724 Solutions' 724 FrameWorksand 724 Paymentssolutions.
Since the company's inception in 1997, 724 Solutions has focused on delivering to the world's largest financial institutions secure, scalable infrastructure that allows them to deliver banking, brokerage, commerce, and related services over a wide variety of Internet-enabled devices - including digital mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and pagers. The company's solutions are deployed in leading financial institutions who today are offering services to consumers in Canada, the United States, South Korea, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Switzerland, among others.
724 Solutions' move into the mobile operator market is not only a strategic extension of the company's core competency of enabling secure mobile transactions, it is also very timely, according to Chief Executive Officer John Sims.
"724 Solutions has developed the infrastructure solutions that allow businesses - be they financial institutions or mobile operators - to offer services over mobile devices that can help drive positive return on investment in the short-, medium-, and long-term," said Sims. "We have addressed important issues such as security, scalability and robustness for the toughest customers in the world - financial institutions. We believe that our solutions have a key role to play with mobile operators as they look for ways to drive revenues today and in the future."
"The Yankee Group expects that global capital expenditure for wireless mobile network infrastructure will increase from $99.4 billion in 2001 to a maximum of $120.2 billion in 2004," said Francesca Mabarak, Senior Analyst with the Yankee Group. "By focusing on its core competencies - financial transactions, security and authentication, multi-modal mobile applications development, high availability applications delivery - 724 Solutions is providing unique and valuable solutions to help mobile operators generate new revenue schemes immediately as they implement 2.5G and 3G technologies."
Strategy
Sims said that his company's approach focuses on rich infrastructure services rather than searching for the "killer" application. 724 Solutions believes that by implementing secure, scalable services infrastructure, mobile operators eliminate the guesswork and can let consumers and the market dictate what the killer application will be for each country, and possibly even each device.
The company's overarching vision is to deliver solutions that leverage mobile operators' existing infrastructure investments to generate revenue today, while laying the groundwork for what they will need to continue revenue generation through their deployments of 3G and beyond. To accomplish this, 724 Solutions has created an offering based on its core competencies: security, scalability, monetary transactions, alerts, and platform.
Offering
724 Alerts: This product enables mobile operators to generate additional revenue immediately by migrating their existing 'communication oriented' SMS/IM subscriber base into consuming 'transaction oriented' services. The solution provides mobile operators with the capability to in turn enable a broad range of third party applications to deliver interactive actionable alerts in a broad range of industry verticals. In conjunction with 724 Payments these alerts can contain 'buy now' functionality. 724 Solutions' alerts solution is a carrier-grade monitoring, detection, and notification system for delivering customizable actionable alerts to any networked device.
724 Payments: This product builds on the company's core competency of enabling secure transactions to deliver a secure payments solution that allows mobile operators to extend their VAS to enable transactions. 724 Solutions is building a secure payments solution that is interoperable with the payment schemes of today - and of tomorrow, essentially shielding mobile operators from any changes in payment methods and technologies as payment standards continue to solidify. The solution also allows mobile operators to decide on the degree of their involvement in the transaction process thus giving them more control over the fees garnered from the provision of transaction services over the longer term.
724 FrameWorks: This product dramatically reduces both the cost and complexity of deploying multi-modal applications to a broad array of devices. Supporting multiple devices, mark-up languages, and security schemes, the FrameWorks allows for simple and rapid development of mobile applications, backed by one of the most scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant platforms in the market.
"Mobile operators face increased competition, decreasing airtime margins, and significant investment costs associated with technology evolution. 724 Solutions has leveraged its core competencies in secure, scalable infrastructure and transaction-driving applications to assemble a solution that should allow mobile operators to generate short-term and long-term revenue despite the difficult market conditions seen in some regions," said Sims.
About 724 Solutions Inc.
724 Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ: SVNX; TSE: SVN) is a leading provider of mobile Internet infrastructure software and applications. It makes m-business happen globally by powering the delivery of secure mobile transactions for financial institutions and mobile operators. With dual headquarters in Toronto, Canada, and Austin, Texas, the company has development and sales offices around the world. For more information visit www.724.com.
This press release contains statements of a forward-looking nature. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include the statements herein regarding: the services and products that will be offered by 724 Solutions to network operators, the benefits that mobile operators will obtain from these services and products and future demand for these services and products. The accuracy of these statements may be impacted by a number of business risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated, including the risk that 724 Solutions will be unable to deploy the solutions and products stated herein, the risk that the demand for the solutions and products will not increases as presently anticipated and other risks described in 724 Solutions' SEC filings, including its annual report on Form 10-K. These risks are also described in 724 Solutions' filings with the Canadian Securities Administrators, including its prospectuses, material change reports, Annual Information Form and Management Information Circular. 724 Solutions does not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information, except as required under applicable law.
For more information, contact:
Avichai Levy, VP Marketing Mobixell Networks
Tel: +972 544 666 785
Avichai.levy@mobixell.com
Kirsten Scott and Kim Smith, éclat Marketing
Tel: +44 (0)1276 486000
mobixell@eclat.co.uk
