Prism makes KL regional hub

Zoe Phoon
New Straits Times
09-13-2001
Prism makes KL regional hub
Byline: Zoe Phoon
Edition: Main/Lifestyle; 2*
Section: Business
Column: e-world

PRISM Transactive Holdings plc, an emerging leader in secure payment infrastructure and services, is using Kuala Lumpur as regional hub to penetrate Asia via Prism Transactive (M) Sdn Bhd, the first South African- owned company to get MSC-status.

"We want to participate in the Multimedia Super Corridor project which is to boost the Malaysian economy by taking advantage of IT. We want to help make Malaysia an e-commerce hub in Asean and Asia by bringing in and transferring the technologies to Malaysians.
"Payment solutions in e-commerce will need to address security concerns of customers and meet requirements of merchants to avoid fraud and repudiation. Any e-commerce solution must satisfy integrity, confidentiality, authentication and non-repudiation," Wim Grobler, chief executive officer, Asian region, Prism Transactive (M), said in an interview.

He said it is predicted that all content delivery media in the future will be interested in developing secure transaction channels to effect payment between content and service providers such as pay- TV and multimedia production centers as well as the businesses and consumers connected to these service providers.

The Prism groups core competencies and intellectual property in the three critical areas of payment, security and smart card technology enable it to provide fully integrated secure e-payment solutions.

Payment can be effected at points of sale, the Internet and over mobile telephone networks. Its customers include all parties in a payment transaction - cardholders, merchants, corporations, banks and other financial transaction processors and mobile network operators.

"We also benefit from the experience of our development team in South Africa and have found that by addressing the unique combination of demographics and infrastructure challenges in the South African market, were able to deliver proven solutions robust enough to address both developing and developed economies," Grobler noted.

Locally, Prism Transactive (M) has established a strong relationship with Telekom Malaysia Bhd which, in addition to being the country's fixed wire telecommunications provider and owner of two telco licences, is also an investor in international telecom licences in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Malawi, Cambodia, Guinea, Thailand and eastern Europe.

Rosedin Abas, Prism Transactive (M) sales and marketing director for Asia, said business with Telekom Malaysia began with the initial US$6 million (RM22.8 million) order for technology and business process rules that would position Telekom Malaysia to effect payment of the 4.5 million bills the telco issues each month to be processed across its own system, to broaden the offering nationally and regionally with other merchants, service providers and financial institutions over time.

The company and Telekom Malaysia are now 30:70 joint venture partners in Telekom Technology Sdn Bhd which will be launching self- service kiosks this month offering bill payment and related services to ATM and credit card holders.

The use of self-service kiosks is part of moves towards the Government initiative to promote a cashless society that begins with the introduction of the payment multi-purpose card (a chip-based card that allows holders to make purchases without physical cash and which will replace ATM cards by 2003) and the Government multi-purpose card (GMPC).

Rosedin, who was project director of the electronic national passport project and involved in the GMPC (an MSC flagship application) as well as the project on the use of chip cards in telephony in Southeast Asia, expects the relationship with Telekom Malaysia to present further opportunities for deploying Prism technologies to the telcos other subsidiaries.

Regionally, Prism Transactive (M)'s markets include the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong and India.

On its plans, Rosedin said the company will continue to address the proliferation of payment channels by working with best-of-breed technology companies to develop the latest multi-channel solutions. At the same time, it will exploit its early success in the mobile commerce sector.

"We believe a significant catalyst for our future growth will be in secure payment applications for transactions over mobile networks. We've been successful in this market with our Airtrax m-commerce platform and aSIMetrix SIM card solution."

Airtrax facilitates secure transactions over the SMS network and is being implemented by Smartcom in the Philippines and being tested at TM Touch of Telekom Malaysia. Meanwhile, aSIMetrix is the worlds first commercially available key-generating 64K secure SIM card.

bizdesk@nstp.com.my

(Copyright 2001)