Tyfone announced today the availability of iCashe, a new mobile wallet and eCommerce engine that for the first time delivers purchasing power through any mobile banking application.
Built entirely on top of Tyfone's award-winning u4ia mobile financial services platform, iCashe is the industry's only service to blend comprehensive mobile banking features with convenient consumer purchasing, gifting and loyalty programs. With the option of adding Tyfone's SideTap™ microSD secure element technology, iCashe also provides contactless NFC payments and the highest level of secure identity management.
"While financial institutions recognize the need to provide mobile banking, the watch and wait approach many have taken towards mobile wallet services sets the stage for disintermediation by others including Google and ISIS," said Andy Schmidt, research director at TowerGroup, a Corporate Executive Board company. "Combining mobile wallet with mobile banking gives banks - and merchants - the opportunity to avoid this disintermediation."
The first iCashe feature to debut is a highly convenient commerce service available through a mobile banking application that allows people to purchase, send and redeem merchant gift cards from over 100 different name brand merchants including: Barnes & Noble, Fandango and Zappos.com. With iCashe, gift cards can be purchased and stored on a person's mobile phone for personal use, or sent to anyone in the United States via email or text message. iCashe requires a person to be logged into a trusted mobile banking app, making purchasing highly efficient, secure and as easy as checking an account balance.
"iCashe is the first wallet service that allows people to use mobile banking for commerce," said Siva Narendra, Tyfone's president of North America. "A bank ATM card has limited value if a person can only use it to check balances or transfer funds; the same is true for a mobile banking application. By providing consumers a mobile application that combines banking with commerce capabilities, we're not only putting the value and utility of a real wallet into a mobile app, we're sttrengthening the bond between consumers and financial institutions. If banks give their customers something of value, it's fair for them to make money from it. iCashe is the first service giving financial institutions revenue generating opportunities from mobile banking."
Though Tyfone has built an award-winning and fully-featured mobile banking solution, there is no requirement for banks and other financial institutions to use Tyfone Mobile Banking in order to offer iCashe to their customers. Any financial institution can offer customers using electronic and mobile banking convenient commerce services built on top of iCashe, and all financial institutions using iCashe will immediately enjoy a new revenue stream based on incremental transaction fees from iCashe purchases.
"OnPoint Community Credit Union members who use Tyfone's leading edge mobile banking service find great utility from it and have a greater volume of banking transactions," said Jim Armstrong, OnPoint's senior vice president of technology. "Giving people the ability to make purchases through OnPoint's mobile banking app is a logical technology evolution. Once the retail NFC infrastructure is in place, our mobile banking members using Tyfone's iCashe will likewise be ready to make contactless payments through our banking app.