Valista Sees New Hosted Gateway As Key to U.S. M-Payments Market

Looking to make inroads in the U.S. mobile-commerce market, Valista Ltd. has launched a hosted version of its payments-gateway product and has aimed it squarely at mobile operators hoping to cash in on the trend toward so-called off-deck transactions. The payments-software vendor, based in Dublin, Ireland, and in San Mateo, Calif., says it has recruited at least one unnamed U.S. carrier for the new service, which it plans to announce by year's end. “The [U.S] market is finally happening for us,” says Raomal Perera, chief executive of the company, whose clients are mostly in Europe and Asia. “It's very exciting.” By offering its gateway as a managed service, Valista hopes to accommodate carriers that want to cater to the growing demand among subscribers for digital content, such as games and ring tones, available from merchants operating outside the carriers' own portals. Such off-deck content now accounts for about 40% of content sales from carriers in the U.S., Valista estimates. This product, which can come from thousands of small sellers, may soon include TV shows and other video and is typically made available through aggregators that establish links into the carriers' billing engines. The gateway software allows carriers to authenticate buyers, authorize transactions, and manage settlement and refunds. Consumers pay for the content when it appears on their monthly bills from the carrier, which typically pockets anywhere from 30% to 40% of each sale. “Off-deck in the U.S. is still developing, [so] it's an opportunity for us,” says Fran Heeran, Valista's San Mateo-based chief technical officer. With digital-content origination increasingly moving away from the carriers themselves, Valista says the new gateway service also takes advantage of what it sees as a trend among carriers toward so-called direct-to-bill payment for off-portal content (Digital Transactions News, May 22). Premium short-message-service (SMS) transmission, which has been the predominant means for triggering a billed item, lacks the authentication and authorization routines necessary for network operators to support large-scale off-deck sales without risking large-scale losses from fraud and disputed transactions, observers say. In Europe, Valista's software manages direct-to-bill, off-deck sales for Vodafone UK, France Telecom's w-HA, and Orange. Valista, which also offers its gateway as a licensed product, figures U.S. carriers will be receptive to a hosted service. “In Europe, it was ingrained in a carrier that they would host this [service],” says Heeran. “In the U.S., [carriers] are much more open to outsourcing this. Some outsource their billing.” Formed in 2003 out of a merger of two payment-software companies, Network 365 and iPin, Valista signed America Online Inc. as its first U.S. client in November 2004. The company processes more than 20 million transactions a month for 2,500 merchants and aggregators worldwide.