Upaid | Solutions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.