News

Metavante, Monitise to create mobile payments system for North America

April 5, 2007

MILWAUKEE - Metavante Corp., the banking and payments technology subsidiary of Marshall & Ilsley Corp., has announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to form a joint venture with Monitise, a European provider of secure mobile banking and payments capability, to operate a mobile payments system in the United States.

The joint venture to be established by Metavante and Monitise will enable consumers to rely on a common, intuitive and secure interface to initially check account balances, transfer funds between bank accounts and pay bills any time from a mobile phone.

The system will be built using similar principles to the United Kingdom's Monilink platform. Monilink is a joint venture between Monitise and LINK, the operators of the U.K.'s ATM infrastructure. The U.S. venture will enable mobile carriers, financial institutions, payment processors, payment networks and billers to provide innovative and intuitive financial services to consumers through a collaborative ecosystem. The Monitise mobile payment platform is a secure, scalable application endorsed by the World Economic Forum as a pioneering technology.

Monitise solutions feature multi-layer security measures, including a two-factor authentication system that enables mobile phones to securely generate one-time pass codes. In addition to mobile payments, the Metavante-Monitise joint venture makes low-cost, two-factor authentication services available to U.S. and Canadian financial institutions through Monitise's ACCODE service. ACCODE replaces hardware tokens and key fobs by enabling mobile phones to securely generate a One-Time Passcode for desktop, remote and portal access, along with POS and Web-based payments.

Metavante and Monitise have been in discussions with key potential participants in the platform, and they expect to launch the initial services to consumers later this year.

Metavante will provide hosting services for the Monitise mobile payments platform in the United States. As part of the hosting services, the NYCE Network will connect the Monitise platform to its switch. NYCE is a Metavante company and a leading U.S. electronic payments network providing consumers with secure, real-time access to their money, connecting the accounts of more than 74 million cards with 280,000 ATMs and 1.5 million POS locations nationwide.

"The alliance between NYCE and Monitise will establish two parts of a complete whole," said Steve Rathgaber, president and chief operating officer at NYCE. "Monitise is uniquely suited to interface with the mobile side, where the transactions will be initiated, and NYCE will bring those transactions the rest of the way to the consumers' accounts, over our own secure, reliable infrastructure."