aimm News

 

Enterprises in all industries and across all geographies recognise that mobile communications are dramatically altering how we engage with each other. Mobile is influencing which brands we buy, changing the companies we work for, and further driving the requirement for personalised, relevant customer and employee engagement.

 

OpenMarket provides a secure and reliable platform for major enterprises to engage their key audiences with a service commitment to back it up. Their market experience and trusted relationships with mobile operators across the globe enable faster time to market, and ongoing delivery and support for your mobile initiatives. In addition, the OpenMarket payments platform offers a low-friction, convenient, safe and dependable way for your customers to pay. Furthermore, the company works closely with AIME and Phonepayplus to ensure that all its payments customers respect the Phonepayplus Code of Practice.

 

Enterprises choose OpenMarket as their mobile partner for a number of reasons: domain expertise, service flexibility, demonstrated network performance and reliability, global scale and corporate maturity.

 

Domain Expertise: OpenMarket resolves the complexities and fragmentation of the mobile ecosystem by providing expertise in mobile engagement solutions, regulatory compliance and industry best practices.

•          15 years of industry experience powering thousands of mobile campaigns

•          Award-winning, live 24/7 technical support services, spanning all time zones

 

Service Flexibility: OpenMarket’s portfolio of solutions, flexible Mobile Engagement Platform and professional services allow enterprises to support multiple use cases for customers and employees.

•          APIs and Service Editor support customisation across use cases and enable developers and business users to create and manage mobile programs.

•          Support for smart and interactive messaging across multiple mobile channels, including SMS, MMS, push notifications, payments, email and voice, enabling you to meet business needs

•          The platform’s workflow engine manages the heavy lifting, including the service flow logic, the message channels used, inputs from internal and external sources, and message personalisation.

 

Demonstrated Performance and Reliability: Global enterprises trust OpenMarket with their mobile engagement business because of their scalable and highly reliable platform, industry-leading SLAs and operational expertise.

•          Industry-leading, cloud-based Mobile Engagement Platform allows enterprises to create custom mobile solutions without the need for their own technical infrastructure

•          400+ enterprise customers, including 4 out of the top 10 global brands; ability to reach 3 billion mobile users

•          Flexible, scalable platform architecture, processing over 1 billion messaging interactions per month

•          Demonstrated 99.99% availability using autonomous, geo-redundant systems

 

Global Scale: A number of the world’s largest enterprises choose OpenMarket for their global reach, market leadership, capacity and support, helping them engage with their customers and employees globally.

•          Connectivity to more than 200 countries globally, accessing 3 billion mobile users while processing over 1 billion messaging interactions per month

•          Serving more than 400 enterprises worldwide with an experienced staff of 200

 

Corporate Maturity: Enterprises partner with OpenMarket for their breadth of solutions, industry expertise, financial stability, mature business practices, data security and privacy policies. All of which help minimise business risk and optimise ROI.

•          15 years of experience delivering mobile engagement solutions across different organisational departments, industries and mobile channels

•          A business of Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a multibillion dollar public company with 250+ service provider customers in 70 countries

•          Mature security and privacy standards including adherence to country-specific regulations, Safe Harbor, PCI and GLBA compliance, and targeting ISO27001 certification

 

To find out more about OpenMarket visit www.openmarket.com.

11 August 2014

AIME, together with the Mobile Broadband Group (www.mobilebroadbandgroup.com) and PhonepayPlus (www.phonepayplus.org) has written to Ms. Andrea Leadsom MP, Financial Secretary to the Treasury to seek support of the UK Treasury in blocking proposed changes to the European Payment Services Directive (PSD) that will affect the operation of most of the premium rate industry and move mobile and fixed line services into Financial Regulation.

As the proposed changes were not justified by any loopholes or exploits created through the 2007 Payment Services Directive and the new wording for exempting telecommunication providers would force them to make significant architectural and operational changes  to support financial type payments (or kill nearly a third of their premium rate business), AIME has been lobbying since September 2013 to suppress the change.

Proposals for revisions to the exemption wording by the EU Council have been seen by AIME and while improved will limit the per transaction and per month consumer expenditure in contradiction to regulatory changes that increase consumer spend limits on telecoms accounts.

AIME, MBG and PPP worked with the UK Treasury to input the UK concerns to EU, but AIME feels that these concerns are not getting the  priority treatment that is required to ensure UK interests (which are reflected at least by Ireland France and Czech Republic) are robustly protected.

As a result, the letter to Andrea Leadsom is designed to improve awareness of our concerns to a higher level and at time of writing, a response has been received from the Treasury

AIME Members can access the letter here

 

08 August 2014

AIME, the Association of Interactive and Media Entertainment professionals specialising in micropayment services including voting, competitions, charity donations and mobile commerce, today released its Early Warning System to Members to warn Digital Marketing companies about rogue and fraudulent practices operated by entities masquerading as legitimate online publishers.

These practices are designed to defraud digital advertisers of their advertising funds and in the process, often cause issues for consumers who may be misled into purchasing services that they do not want.

AIME Members in the micropayment (also called premium rate) market raised their concerns around malpractice affecting digital marketing, and AIME responded with two major initiatives. The first is the AIME Digital Marketing Guide that advises advertisers operating in the internet marketing arena, on how to detect and prevent fraud attempts aimed at their advertising budget.

The second is a community blogging platform known as the AIME Early Warning System for advertisers to warn each other of bad practices that they have encountered when conducting their own monitoring.

Additional to advertisers’ posting warnings, AIME has negotiated to receive postings from PhonepayPlus (the UK premium rate regulator) and from monitoring and compliance companies such as Enarpee, Empello and ETX.  AIME is in discussions with anti-virus software companies and the UK Cabinet Office about collaborating with their cybercrime and malware information sharing initiatives, and getting their relevant alerts posted into the AIME Early Warning System.

Cybercrime can affect consumers who use smartphones, tablets and computers to access the internet.  Consumers are particularly vulnerable if they have not installed anti-virus software on portable devices as infections with adware or malware are becoming increasingly common.

In addition the Internet is rife with dubious practices like ‘clickjacking’ and ‘typosquatting’, designed to trick consumers into visiting or even purchasing chargeable services under false pretences.

In all these cases, it is often the internet advertiser who has to deal with the fallout from the consumer issue while also losing out financially to the fraud.

Used together, AIME’s Digital Marketing Guide and Early Warning System provides relevant and timely information to enable advertiser to protect themselves from affiliate fraud and in doing so, help to protect online consumers from harm.

AIME Chairman Edward Boddington, stated:

“Affiliate marketing fraud is a serious problem for all Internet advertisers.  It causes particular issues for merchants using micropayment options as often the fraud is not caught until after users have been misled, leading to brand damage in addition to defrauded advertising spend.

Last year Internet advertising fraud cost AIME members around £20 million, in addition to considerable brand damage.

“Together AIME’s two initiatives are equivalent to a Neighbourhood Watch for online advertisers.  Both initiatives are a success because of the extensive support provided by Members.  AIME’s strength is enabling Members to collaborate on solutions to industry issues so as to protect and nurture the marketplace in which they work.”

We are aware that users are experiencing some problems with the downloadable contribution form on our new EWS site. The form is currently in PDF format and people are having difficulties editing the fields as needed.

 

If you would like to make a contribution we now have a Word version of this form available. Please email: info@aimm.co for this and we will send it over to you ASAP.

 

We are in the process of trying rectifying this problem on our site as soon as we can, so everyone has easy access to the Word version of this form.

 

Many thanks for your patience on this matter.

 

The AIME Team