Monday, December 29, 2014

IFAN Financial, Inc. (IFAN) Mobile Payment Technologies Bring Same-As-Cash Functionality to Smartphone

IFAN Financial continues to target the burgeoning m-commerce space with the development of highly disruptive solutions, made available via their wholly-owned iPIN Technologies and Mobicash America subsidiaries. The latest news from the company’s iPIN subsidiary, about having achieved significant development milestones on their smartphone card reader, mobile app and merchant network solution, is particularly bullish considering the amazing features this solution makes available.

With user interface integration to Android achieved and successful data read/transfer from the card swipe attachment to the mobile app now validated, IFAN is set up nicely for finishing the transaction status call back functionality and front-end database (in order to support a merchant processing transaction) development milestones for this powerful solution. Once complete, this solution will not only offer consumers total control over their transaction data, it will give both retailers and consumers unprecedented price transparency, with blanket 1.5% per debit card swipe processing fees (compared to 2.7% for PayPal Here and 2.75% for Square), while simultaneously eliminating nearly any and all bank chargebacks, since the transactions are viewed as being same-as-cash.

With retail m-commerce up around 70% to just over $42B last year according to eMarketer estimates, a value that is set to jump another 37% next year to around one-fifth of all retail ecommerce sales (or 1.2% of all retail sales), the stage has been set for innovative payment technologies like the ones IFAN is rolling out. As smartphone and tablet proliferation continues to be quite strong, with around 8% and 4% growth respectively this year (some 243M units total shipped, or around 35% of the consumer electronics industry’s revenue), the demand for solutions that hand even greater control to the user will only increase as the number of mobile users increases.

The latest estimates from Goldman Sachs on m-commerce growth indicate that by 2018, retail sales will grow to some $626B, or about as much as ecommerce did in total last year, up sharply from just $133B during 2013. In the U.S., m-commerce sales are forecast to more than triple over the same interval, eventually raking in almost 33% of all ecommerce sales, as the broader ecommerce space beats expectations by the likes of Euromonitor, eMarketer and Forrester.

With such a huge, moving target for identity thieves (17% of all identity theft in 2013 was credit card related), the fact that the iPIN solution means merchants won’t even have access to the customer’s card information should be a real selling point to consumers who understand the everyday risks involved, especially after what seems like two years straight of high profile data hacks at major retailers like Target and Home Depot. In 2012 alone identity theft victims experienced over $24.7B in direct and indirect losses, nearly double the losses from burglary, motor vehicle theft, and other types.

IFAN’s Mobicash America subsidiary has also has posted some great news lately, with their next-gen online payment app, Quidme, approved for all Apple iPhones and tablets, as well as most Android devices. Quidme is something of an end-run on the cash transfer market, offering easy peer-to-peer transfers, as well as online payments between anyone with mobiles, tablets, or computers. The cash transfer market is changing rapidly, as consumers continue to take the power away from players like PayPal and Western Union with amazing new technologies. Western Union did 231M transfers worldwide last year, moving around $79B from person to person, or around an amazing 28 transactions per second, each with a percentage shaved off for profit’s sake. Most online alternatives can take days or even weeks to complete and Western Union (79% of which is consumer-to-consumer transactions) has survived largely on their ability to do instant transfers. However, this market is ebbing fast, as innovators in the mobile payment and cash transfer technologies space, like IFAN, come increasingly to the fore, spurred on by consumer demand from sectors like remittance.

Mobicash’s Quidme platform is a comprehensive, pure mobile solution that works without data coverage on any phone, enabling consumers to instantly transfer funds without having to expose their sensitive bank data to potential identity theft. This is a game-changer for remittances (sending money back home), which have an average transfer fee of around 8% and which generate triple the money every year as the entire global aid budget according to World Bank figures. Filipinos received more last year in remittances for instance (over $25B), than the value of the country’s entire electronics industry. Quidme’s ability to also act as a platform for paying bills and making purchases means it is a highly disruptive technology that can not only radically expand the available market for mobile payment access, it also has the potential to disrupt the very payment space as we know it.

Learn more about IFAN Financial by visiting: www.ifanfinancial.com

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