Mobile banking and payment service provider ClairMail Inc. has partnered with CashEdge Inc. to offer person-to-person mobile payments to financial institutions.

The partnership will provide financial institutions with connectivity to CashEdge’s Popmoney platform through the ClairMail platform. As a result of the relationship, ClairMail customers will have the ability to provide consumers with a secure, consistent mobile banking and P2P payments experience.

“The partnership between ClairMail and CashEdge is one that we see as very beneficial, both for financial institutions and consumers,” said Reetika Grewal, director of product marketing at ClairMail, Novato, CA. “ClairMail has a proven mobile banking solution that financial institutions trust, while CashEdge has P2P payments technology that has been shown to be both secure and robust.

“Through integrating the two technologies on ClairMail’s platform, financial institutions gain mobile P2P transfer capabilities that keep customer activity inside the institution,” she said. “Customers also win by gaining the ability to safely transfer money on the go through institutions they trust to handle their finances.”

Through integration with ClairMail’s platform, the two companies will enable financial institutions to offer their customers the ability to send payments by simply using the email address or mobile phone number of the recipient.

Each financial institution can custom-brand the Popmoney mobile experience, which provides consumers the security of using a service offered directly from their bank.

The integrated mobile P2P banking platform will also give consumers greater control over all aspects of their personal finances, enabling them to make payments to others at any time.

With the increasing adoption of smarter mobile devices, consumers are looking at the mobile channel to move money and take more control of their finances through richer engagement with their financial institution, according to CashEdge.

By teaming with ClairMail, CashEdge is able to broaden the scope of its reach and increase usage of Popmoney by integrating across its customer network.

“CashEdge provides ClairMail with a tried and true P2P payments technology,” Ms. Grewal said. “As ClairMail’s Mobile connectivity architecture is flexible and adapts easily to ever-evolving technologies, it was not difficult to integrate CashEdge into the overall mobile solution.”

Intelligent Payments Solution
ClairMail has also introduced its new Intelligent Payments Solution as part of its mobile payments strategy designed to use a financial institution’s existing payment infrastructure and capabilities.

The new service uses a platform-based approach and leverages ClairMail’s recently announced Mobile Connectivity Architecture (MCA) to deliver a variety of mobile applications including bill payment, mobile remote deposit capture (RDC), person-to-person (P2P) payments, gift card top-ups, merchant offers and international remittance.

The bill payment and Mobile RDC functionality will be available in the second quarter 2010, while the other applications will be introduced later this year. Future releases will also include capabilities for Near Field Communications (NFC) and mobile wallet.

ClairMail’s Intelligent Payments Solution leverages the company’s strengths in alerting, personalization, connectivity, orchestration and convergence to provide a mobile payments platform to financial institutions.

The platform features custom connectivity to support any payment method now and in the future.

This approach maximizes the financial institution’s control and monetization over the payments process, and enables them to continue to be the centerpiece for facilitating money movement for their customers.

The open platform that can work with the financial institution’s chosen payment method and can migrate to other payment alternatives in the future.

The platform also enables orchestration of the entire payment workflow across the participants, the bank and multiple payment methods. This includes informing/billing of the originator, initiation of the payment, routing and delivering of the funds and confirming the payment completion and delivery of funds.

The user experience allows consumers a choice between cost and speed to settle a payment transaction, supported by interaction with the underlying payment system or systems.

As for Popmoney person-to-person payments, this capability is available to all ClairMail clients through ClairMail’s MCA.

“While we are in trials with a few financial institutions, we are not currently announcing specific institutions implementing this solution,” Ms. Grewal said.