Strex Mobile Payments System to Get a Boost from Amdocs
One of the best parts of the mobile payments market is that geography has precious little to do with it. While some solutions aren’t immediately usable when crossing into different countries, often times, those countries have their own mobile payments solutions waiting for you.
Norway, meanwhile, is no different on this front, and the three biggest operators in Norway are bringing in Amdocs to help drive their new Strex mobile payment service.
The agreement calls for Tele2, Telenor, and TeliaSonera to get together and offer the Strex service as a single mobile wallet option, allowing subscribers to put the service to work for digital or physical goods and services, as well as send money to family and friends via Short Message Service (SMS), Web-based transaction, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) transmission or by mobile app.
The Strex system can connect to a bank account, to a credit or debit card, or even send bills to a standard mobile bill, providing a variety of billing options to its users.
Strex already represents over 75 million SMS transactions annually, according to Strex CEO Hege Kosberg, so the enhancements that Amdocs will bring in are clearly welcome and should go a long way toward augmenting its already noteworthy position in the overall market in the region.
Kosberg notes that the new funding and payment options that Amdocs will bring in should also prove not only to be welcome for the extra flexibility for consumers, but also for merchants, who will get access to not just a better marketing platform, but also, according to Kosberg, the ability to bring in loyalty programs, which have a great potential to boost sales.
Naturally, it’s debatable just how well this would work. Still, the basic premise is sound enough; after all, we’ve got a super-convenient payment system here that can tie readily into several different sources of payment, and work equally well at a variety of different retailers both online and offline. It was already good stuff, but the addition of Strex to the system makes an already good thing even better.
Of course, if it tried to compete outside of Norway—outside of Scandinavia, even—it might face much stiffer competition, but there’s something to be said for being the regional favorite. It keeps major multinational competitors like Apple Pay out of the field, and offers up a solid foundation for future expansion.
Only time will tell just how well the combination of Amdocs and Strex does, of course, but it certainly looks like it’s going to be a terrific move for the Norwegian carrier coalition putting this combination into action.