Singapore, Monday, 22nd October 2001 - mPayment, a specialist payment solutions provider, e-commerce enabler and e-marketing solutions company, today, took home the Wireless Asia M-apps Award. Year-old, local company, mPayment beat 25 other international SMS developers for the best mobile application in the SMS category with their payment solution.

The award, another feather in the cap for mPayment comes in the midst of a string of recent mPayment wins. Last week it was selected for iDA's CFC (call for collaboration) for mobile payment under the ST Electronics consortium. Its mLibrary™ services was launched at the signing of an MOU with the National Library Board Singapore (NLB). Today, the mobile library and payment services are available to nearly two million library users in Singapore.

Mr Daniel Wong, mPayment's General Manager, was elated, " In 2000, when we set up the company, we saw that SMS was the only viable wireless data platform. So we asked ourselves how we could use SMS to enhance people's lives and came up with a set of solutions that enables consumers to pay for anything via SMS. We set out on our mission to make all credit, direct debit, cashcard and peer-to-peer transactions mobile".

There were 70 qualified entries in the three categories from 12 Asian countries including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Taiwan. Hong Kong had the most entries with 24 submissions, followed by Singapore with 12 and Thailand with 10 entries. The entries to the awards, which were presented today by Wireless Asia

publisher, Conor McCabe, saw a very high level of innovation, both in business and technology and showed that Asia is the pacesetter for the world when it comes to mobile device applications. And aptly so, considering the fact that Asia has some of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership.

The Wireless Asia M-Apps Awards were open across the region from July to September 2001 and were judged by a panel of experts from a select list by the Wireless Asia editorial team.

The judges were: Bertrand Bidaud, regional head of telecoms research at Gartner Group; Ovum analysts, Jeremy Matthews, Nikki Murrell and Jackie Cooper; Chas Sweeting, co-founder of Wireless Forum Asia; and Kenneth Lui, Java architect at Sun Microsystems.

" SMS is, today, the ideal medium to offer both mobile payment and value-added m-commerce merchant services, like mLibrary which we implemented for NLB. Our "live" deployed m-commerce solutions can today undertake renewal of magazine and club subscriptions, allow payment of monthly carpark charges, account enquiry, alerts and updates of any kind of accounts including credit cards, club bills, retailer and petrol chain accounts and loyalty points," said Daniel.

He continued, "The award will certainly be a boost to mPayment's current discussions on its mobile payment and m-commerce products with several organisations in Singapore and Malaysia."

Over the next three months mPayment will be working towards launching mobile marketing, mobile insurance, and other m-commerce products. These products will be deployed in actual merchant sites.