 What is HiPAAS?
Beyond Walled Gardens - Ubiquitous Mobile
Payments
HiPAAS Services
Who Plugs In?
Connectivity, Protocols and Authentication
Methods
Benefits
Download PDF Product Information:
HiPAAS Top-up: User Experience
HiPAAS Community Architecture
HiPAAS Transaction Flow
What is HiPAAS?
The demand for universal payment advice and clearing
services for the mobile payments market is enormous.
Despite several attempts by various groups of mobile
operators, banks and merchants to create a mobile payment
service, there is still a huge gap between creating
a functional payment solution and having a solution
that is actually deliverable, usable and available to
all. Whilst banks, mobile operators, card associations
and merchants all want to participate in the mobile
payments market, none of them are in a position to provide
the necessary connectivity to build a wide-scale, far-reaching
mobile payments community.
For a system to be effective, it must be able to support
anywhere-to-anywhere payments – from any bank to any
merchant and across any network. To date, no system
or service that all parties can simply plug into has
been made available.
Upaid has solved all of these problems by creating
HiPAAS.
HiPAAS is a ‘Highly Intelligent Payment Authentication
and Authorization Service’.
HiPAAS is a complete service offering which is powered
by Upaid’s own proprietary payment processing software.
Upaid’s software solutions enable multiple parties such
as banks, mobile operators and merchants to connect
to centralized payment authentication and service delivery
centers to allow anywhere-to-anywhere handset-authorized
payments.
Back to
top
Beyond Walled Gardens - Ubiquitous
Mobile Payments
Very early on mobile operators realized the benefit
of using mobile phones to authorize payments. These
operators quickly initiated schemes with a select number
of merchants to enable mobile phone bill payment, with
charges billed to customers’ monthly bills. Such restricted,
or ‘walled garden’, implementations remain non-scalable,
support only a limited number of industry standards,
and are non-marketable, leaving operators the burden
of assuming credit risk and serving as ultimate guarantors
of payment.
Walled garden initiatives by definition can involve
only certain banks, operators and merchants, resulting
in a mobile payment community that is restricted to
an extremely limited group of end-users. It amounts
to being told ‘you can pay this bill as long as you
have a mobile phone from X-Phones, a bank account with
Y-Bank and you only want to buy from Z-Merchant.
HiPAAS is the only ubiquitous, open service available
to any mobile operator, bank, merchant or card association
wishing to launch a wide-scale mobile payments initiative.
Back to
top
HiPAAS Services
Our payment authentication centers connect operators,
banks and merchants, and support a number of mobile
payment applications. All applications use current-generation
infrastructure.
HiPAAS offers
- a more secure and convenient way of authorizing
payments using CLI and PIN
- a hassle-free bill payment method, replacing traditional
checks
- a way of authorizing and making payments, wherever
and whenever
- complete and flexible payment control vs. standing
instructions or direct debit
- total payment security – no merchant access to card
numbers, no sensitive information stored on the handset
- access to an open, secure payment network supporting
multiple payment methods
- mobile payments over current-generation handsets,
eliminating the wait for future generation devices
for intelligent mobile payment services.
Prepaid Top-up from Bank Accounts
The current voucher-based method that most operators
use to offer top-up of prepaid mobile accounts can cost
them anywhere between 10% and 30% of overall top-up
revenue. By plugging into HiPAAS, banks and mobile operators
can offer prepaid top-up services via SMS, ATM or Web,
with money for top-up being directly debited from a
user’s bank account or credit/debit card. HiPAAS can
also enable Point of Sale top-ups of prepaid mobile
accounts at participating HiPAAS merchant sites.
Back to
top
Who Plugs In?
Issuing and acquiring banks, mobile operators and merchants
alike can plug into HiPAAS for easy, highly secure connectivity
to Upaid’s centralized payment processing centers.
HiPAAS can also support card associations’ specific
authentication methods.
Back to
top
Connectivity, Protocols and
Authentication Methods
Connectivity to the HiPAAS for all parties can be via
secure VPN or by TCP/IP.
For message exchange with acquiring and issuing banks,
HiPAAS supports
- ISO 8583 – various country variants
- Base24
- APACS 29b, 30, 40
For interfacing with mobile operators’ SMSCs, HiPAAS
can support the following protocols
- CIMD
- SMPP
- UCP
For handling transaction from merchants, HiPAAS supports
- ISO 8583
- APIs
- Custom Interfaces
HiPAAS also supports card associations’ proprietary
authentication methods
- 3D Secure (Visa)
- SecureCode (MasterCard)
Back to
top
Benefits
For services such as SMS-based prepaid top-up from
bank accounts, the return on investment for mobile operators
is dramatic: HiPAAS services result in a truly radical
savings on the cost of managing prepaid top-ups when
compared with traditional voucher schemes. The cost
of producing the vouchers, distribution expenses, merchant
commissions and voucher fraud are all eradicated – operators
simply pay for the service on a transaction-cost basis.
Operators can also make better use of largely underutilized
networks.
More and more banks are searching for new and innovative
ways of attracting and retaining customers. They also
wish to convert cash transactions into card-based transactions
in order to increase transaction-processing volumes.
By becoming the enabler of a more convenient way for
users to better control their payments, banks can improve
customer loyalty whilst helping to ensure that more
and more transactions are funneled through banking systems.
By approving the use of HiPAAS, card associations increase
both their transaction volumes and the numbers of card
accounts issued by their member banks around the world.
Merchants can also offer innovative mobile payment
services to their customers, increase cash flows, and
dramatically reduce the costs of bill collection and
payment through a more efficient and immediate mobile-based
bill payment service.
Consumers benefit from the convenience of authorizing
payments whenever and wherever and increased control
over their payments via a highly secure PIN-authentication
process.
Back to
top |