The Prepaid Press - July 15, 2008 - (Page 23) PAYMENTS July 15 · 2008 - 23 Prepaid Entrepreneurs Start New Fund Sosa Brothers to Focus on Financial Services Innovation Ventures as a venture fund run by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs who believe in the common cause of empowerment and want to devote their passion for innovation to making positive changes in the world.” MPOWER Ventures seeks to free latent economic potential and generate meaningful social impact in underserved markets around the world. Recognizing that underserved markets hold great promise and great risk, MPOWER Ventures invests to ensure portfolio companies succeed in achieving their business and social objectives. “We thought carefully about how to engineer a model for venture funding that would support our vision to create self-sustaining companies that not only return profits but also truly impact lives,” said Bertrand Sosa, managing partner, MPOWER Ventures and president, MPOWER Labs. “The social capital model of investing seemed ideally suited to our vision for the way we believe entrepreneurs can create value, promote change and make a positive impact in the world.” MPOWER Ventures partners with MPOWER Ventures to introduce of financial services to underserved markets. “We’ve built a long-term partnership based on our shared passion for empowerment,” said Jorge Vergara, managing partner, MPOWER Ventures, “and we believe that by investing in entrepreneurship and innovation we can reach people around the world whom the market has so far failed to serve with the products and services they want and deserve.” See the “5 Minutes With Bertrand Sosa” interview in this issue. Source: MPOWER Ventures (www.mpowerventures.com) MasterCard, Obopay to Offer Mobile Payments New Service to Allow Payments and Banking PURCHASE, NY (June 18, 2008) MasterCard and Obopay will offer a fully-integrated on-demand person-to-person mobile payment service in the United States. The service will be offered using MasterCard MoneySend, and will give MasterCard customers a mobile payments service on all credit, debit and prepaid MasterCard-branded products. The announcement said that consumers are increasingly seeking to use their mobile phones for banking and payment transactions. It said that TowerGroup estimates that in the United States, adoption of consumer mobile banking has quintupled in the past 12 months from 1.1 million active users in 2007 to 5.7 million active users today. As mobile consumers become increasingly comfortable with converging technologies on their mobile devices, the opportunity to develop mobile payments systems will continue to grow. The Mobile MasterCard MoneySend Person-to-Person service will allow participants to securely send and receive funds through any registered cardholder’s mobile phone. Participants will use mobile numbers to send and receive funds, keeping their payment account numbers private. “Our strong partnership with Obopay takes the development of the mobile person-to-person payments framework to the next level,” said Art Kranzley, Chief Emerging Technology Officer, MasterCard Worldwide. “The power and breadth of the MasterCard network combined with the account relationships of MasterCard issuers and Obopay’s mobile payment technology enable us to offer valuable new services for consumers throughout the U.S., allowing consumers to easily transfer funds to their friends and families. We will launch this new service with our financial institution customers and Obopay in the near future.” “Obopay is proud to establish this partnership with MasterCard, and we look forward to developing a service that will build on MasterCard’s history of delivering mobile services to their cardholders” said Obopay President, U.S.-based Operations, Gregory Holmes. “With more consumers clamoring for services that fit their mobile lifestyles, we’re confident that MasterCard cardholders will welcome the option of quickly and easily sending money to other cardholders via mobile phone.” MasterCard says it has over 28 million MasterCard PayPass cards and devices in use at more than 109,000 merchant locations worldwide, and multiple in-market mobile PayPass trials taking place in the U.S. Source: MasterCard International (www.mastercard.com) Obopay (www.obopay.com) AUSTIN, TX (June 10, 2008) MPOWER Ventures, LP have announced a $100 million commitment to invest in seed and early stage companies developing financial services and products for underserved markets. MPOWER Ventures also announced its first investment in MPOWER Labs, Inc., a global research and development incubator created to generate technology and product innovations and accelerate the development of MPOWER Ventures portfolio companies. The capital committed to MPOWER Ventures comprises personal investments by MPOWER Ventures principals Roy Sosa, Bertrand Sosa and Jorge Vergara Madrigal. The Sosas were early entrepreneurs in the prepaid debit market, founding NetSpend. “Though we started in the realm of financial services, we have come to believe there are many industries in which market failures have left a majority of the world without adequate choices to improve their lives, including healthcare, education, and energy,” said Roy Sosa, managing partner, MPOWER Ventures and chief executive officer, MPOWER Labs. “We believe that strategic investment can fuel the development of private-sector solutions to these persistent social problems, and to that end we created MPOWER August 19-21, Caesars Palace, Las Come Visit Us in Booth 406 at The Prepaid Press Expoas Veg http://www.mastercard.com http://www.obopay.com http://www.mpowerventures.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.