Singapore Technologies Electronics Limited (ST Elect), the electronics arm of Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd (SGX:ST ENGG), has acquired a 19.8 per cent equity stake in mPayment Pte Ltd.

ST Elect will have an option to increase its current shareholding to 33 per cent.

The other shareholders of mPayment are Green Dot Capital, the e-business arm of Singapore Technologies Pte Ltd, which holds 20.2 per cent in the capital of mPayment, and founders and business angel which hold 60.0 per cent.
mPayment specialises in mobile-payment, mobile-commerce and mobile-marketing solutions and holds 4 new patent-pending technologies - mPurse, mDebit, mCredit and mP2P.

"We see mobile commerce as the next big consumer market driver. ST Elect intends to develop and deliver mobile payment solutions for the market. We have identified mPayment as one of several vehicles that will help us achieve this objective. mPurse, the Short Message Service ("SMS") based micro-payment solution is the first mobile commerce solution that we are launching as part of our Mobile Commerce Initiatives," Seah Moon Ming, President of ST Elect and Chairman of mPayment, said in a statement.

With mPurse, a consumer need only send a simple formatted SMS instruction to make payment to his selected merchant by debiting his virtual stored-value card account with a financial institution. mPurseTM makes it possible to make micro-payments (payments of up to $500 depending on the limits set by banks and virtual card operators) using any mobile phone in the market today, thus overcoming the limitations of existing WAP and SIM card payment solutions which work only with WAP phones and special SIM cards.

"We target to complete and deploy mDebit, mCredit and mP2P by January 2002", said Daniel Wong, General Manager of mPayment. "mDebit and mCredit will enable consumers to make a mobile micro-payment transaction at a participating Point of Sale merchant by directly debiting the transaction amount from his bank account or via a credit card payment into the merchant's bank account".

mP2P will enable mobile peer-to-peer micro-payments that can be extended to cross-border transactions. This means that one party in Singapore can pay another party in another country if they both hold accounts in branches of the same bank that are linked for cross-border payment settlements.