Allowing customers to make instant paperless money transfers to family members thousands of miles away, pay for everyday purchases using only a mobile phone and have access to banking solutions in even the most remote parts of the world, mCommerce is doing more than increasing ARPU and creating a new revenue stream for operators worldwide – it is breaking down social and economic boundaries. mCommerce truly democratizes money.

Zain’s mobile commerce solution, “ZAP,” is at the forefront of this veritable paradigm shift in the Middle East and Africa. Winner of GSMA’s 2010 “Best Mobile Money for the Unbanked” award, Zain’s service offers an opportunity for the 1+ billion unbanked people of Africa to have access to a financial institution without the geographical restrictions inherent to a brick-and-mortar model. ZAP allows customers to bring their entire financial world to their mobile phones.

While the widespread social benefit of ZAP is undeniable, Zain is looking ahead to the future of mCommerce. This is where the Management World 2010 “Developing a Scalable mCommerce Model” team comes in with its groundbreaking Catalyst project.

When Zain decided to engage in TM Forum’s Catalyst program to proactively assure its newfound revenue streams and perform financial analytics on transactional mCommerce data, industry-leading solution vendors Connectiva Systems and Dataupia emerged as the natural choice for thought leaders to collaboratively generate innovation.

Connectiva Systems, a revenue, fraud and customer experience management company, brings its award-winning application suite for aggregating and analyzing mCommerce transactions to deliver actionable insight. Dataupia, the leading provider of scalable data warehousing solutions, provides the high-performance database infrastructure to effortlessly manage the massive volume of mobile commerce data.