Celtron International brings m-Commerce mobile payment technology to the United States

Mobile Internet, The, May, 2004

Celtron International Inc.--a company in the business of developing and marketing products in Mobile Commerce, Vehicle locating and Management, Asset Tracking and Telemetry Solutions--announced recently that its South African subsidiary, Orbtech Holdings Limited, has concluded its technology, business development, and restructuring phase, placing Celtron in a position to commence with the knowledge transfer to establish business components in the USA and the UK.

Celtron has formed PayCell, Inc., a United States subsidiary through which it will offer its Mobile Payment services to North American customers. PayCell's service offering will be based on the CreditPipe technology recently acquired by the Company. The Company will also integrate Molo technology to expand the subscriber base and offer this unique service across all Mobile Telephone Networks as well as fixed line telephone users.

According to Strategy Analytics, the electronic payments and mobile commerce markets will reach $200 billion by the end of 2004, with 130 million customers and 14 billion mobile transactions per year. Telecom Trends International forecasts that global m-Commerce will balloon to 1.7 billion users with $554 billion in transactions by 2008.

Celtron's new service, Mobile Credit, utilizes Wireless Internet Gateway (WIG) technology that resides on a GSM Cellular phone's SIM card. This eliminates the need for any web-based banking service or Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).

Even though a decision was taken not to continue with the Purchase Agreement negotiated to acquire the outstanding stock of Molo Africa Speech Technologies--a company specializing in value-added telecommunications voice services such as IVR, telephony, and speech solutions--a Reseller and Distribution agreement was entered into between the companies in order for Celtron and PayCell to offer this unique solution.

Users receive immediate transaction settlement in their bank account, and confirmation is received in seconds via short messaging system (SMS) protocol. Customers are protected from fraud by the Mail Order Telephone Order (MOTO) rule, which gives them the right to dispute a transaction that takes place in the absence of traditional credit card validation. PricewaterhouseCoopers has audited the architecture of the system and verified that the transactions are both valid and secure.