Richard Braddock has been a leader at a couple of well-known companies. He’s now leading a company designed to be anonymous.
Braddock, former president and chief operating officer of Citigroup Inc. and former chairman and CEO of Priceline.com Inc., is chairman of Mozido, a 5-year-old white-label provider of mobile financial-services platforms. Its newly launched Genius Wallet platform aims to provide partners’ customers a means to remit funds, pay bills and top up prepaid phone minutes using their smartphones. It also offers retailers a way to customize a shopping app for smartphone users, and Mozido provides the platform for partners to brand and market the wallet to their customers.
Retailers who want to offer their customers more efficiency, added customer service, and loyalty and rewards programs, while reaping the benefits of customer information, may integrate Mozido’s platform into their systems, Braddock says.
Mozido has four main target audiences where it will pursue revenue: the unbanked smartphone user, retailers, business-to-business applications and advertising, Braddock tells PaymentsSource. Mozido’s first major partnership is with MoneyGram International, which offers 267,000 locations for the unbanked to remit funds or add value to prepaid card accounts using cash.
MoneyGram two years ago used Mozido as a gateway to a mobile wallet run by wireless service provider Smart Communications in the Philippines, Tim Summers, the funds-transfer company’s global head of strategic partnerships, tells PaymentsSource.
Mozido is certifying and coding to MoneyGram’s application programming interface specifications so Mozido may offer MoneyGram as a Genius Wallet option. Once certifying and coding is complete, MoneyGram can decide what Mozido-partnered carriers or banks it will allow to carry its remittance features.
Mozido will use MoneyGram’s remittance service to market its Genius Wallet, while Mozido will open MoneyGram to new markets of unbanked and underbanked.
Braddock says Mozido’s cloud-based platform, which is phone-carrier agnostic, competes with other wallet systems by offering similar services, like storing financial information and making use of targeted marketing and coupons and rewards programs.
“Most of the wallets are subsets of markets like Google, Citibank, Verizon, American Express. But it’s for their customers,” he says. “The trick at the point of sale is to solve the retailers’ problem.”
The shopping apps that can exist on the platform allow retailers to mimic Internet transactions with benefits such as purchase history and suggestions for other products based on that history to facilitate and enhance in-store sales. Retailers can integrate the wallet into their point-of-sale systems and build the shopping app on the front end and the integration on the back end to accommodate that, Braddock says.
Mozido is trying to help retailers customize an application so they wouldn’t have to wait for widespread acceptance and use of Google Wallet, for instance, Braddock says. Google Wallet is only officially available for certain Sprint Nextel subscribers, and users can maximize its features at a limited list of retailers.
“What we define as the marketplace is not Google customers or Android customers, (and) it’s not Citibank customers; it’s the retailers, and the retailers want the universal solution that will allow them to put a shopping app on every cellphone that walks into their store,” he says.
The aim is to have e-commerce shopping benefits, like transaction history, for customers shopping at brick-and-mortar locations, Braddock says.
“The phone becomes a computer that allows the retailer to bring the Internet values to an offline transaction,” he says.
Mozido expects to announce this spring several partnerships that will further the business-to-business revenue model. The company also plans to introduce additional partners that will increase its reach.
The fourth revenue stream for Genius Wallet is a built-in direct-to-consumer interface through which advertisers can reach wallet users with coupon offers and redemptions.
Todd Ablowitz, president of global payments consulting firm Double Diamond Group, tells PaymentsSource the global numbers on mobile-phone owners suggest there is a vast marketplace for mobile-business opportunities.
“Two-thirds of the world’s population have a mobile phone, so you want to do things leveraging a mobile phone,” Ablowitz says. “It sounds like (Mozido) has a plan, with MoneyGram, for tapping into that market. It’s got great potential for them and others going after that market.”
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