paybox features world of mobile commerce in Dubai

The new applications enable businesses worldwide to create new sources of revenue by offering state-of-the-art mobile services. More than one million subscribers have been connected to mCommerce and mPayment solutions based on paybox technology and consultancy services. Now this number will grow significantly as M-Net K.S.C.C., a Kuwaiti Consortium for Automated Banking Service, is just about to launch
the world's leading mPayment-service in Kuwait.

The current pilot phase successfully adopts the service premiered in Germany in May 2000. The M-Net consortium consists of mtc-Vodafone, National Bank of Kuwait, Al Shaya Group, the Middle East's leading retail group, and Al Roudan International Group. The consortium was
initiated and is chaired by Nasser Al Roudan, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Kuwait. Kuwait, which has a mobile communications market penetration of over 60 percent, will be the first country in the Middle East to launch the mobile payment system. The consortium plans
to subsequently expand the business into further countries in the Gulf region.

"The co-operation with a consortium of such renowned companies in the Middle East and beyond is yet another demonstration of the superiority of our mobile payment system", says Ralph Meister, board member paybox solutions. It is intended that paybox and M-Net develop further
partnerships for establishing mobile payment services throughout the Middle East.

Meanwhile the European success story of paybox is evolving: paybox austria, a subsidiary of mobilkom austria (,,A1-Vodafone"), announced its 100.000 customer. "A wide range of applications is the Austrian formula for success", said Ralph Meister. In addition to mPayment paybox enables all mobile phone owners in Austria to top up their prepaid accounts, purchase tickets for movies or concerts, pay for parking charges or even issue their lottery tickets while on the move.

Also the European client base of paybox solutions is growing: On behalf of Audi AG paybox supported the development of a car configurator allowing fans of the German high-class brand to create their individual car online and share it with friends, family and colleagues via MMS. For MasterCard International paybox has created an interactive voice response solution (IVR) transferring MoneySendTM, the world's first cashless person-to-person payment service, to the mobile phone. Currently the service is used by the Belgian Bank Card Company (BCC), the Islandic SPRON, the Royal Bank of Scotland group and the Italian credit card issuer CartaSi enabling their customers to conduct payments even across borders with their mobile by just calling a service number, keying in the individual amount of money and authorising the payment with a four-digit personal identification number (PIN).

International haulage contractors will shortly benefit from paybox too:

The company just entered into a contract with a leading provider of fuel and service cards allowing truck drivers to replace cash by a card which authenticates the individual driver and allows payments from almost anywhere in the world.

The benefits for businesses worldwide offered by paybox are also approved by leading IT companies such as Oracle. Since the paybox premiere in May 2000 all paybox applications are managed on oracle databases. Hence the applications are also accessible on Oracle Application Servers underlining the versatility of paybox as IT provider and its position among the leading mBusiness companies worldwide.