Comviva, the global leader in providing mobile financial and VAS solutions, on Wednesday announced its readiness to provide its multi award winning mobiquity mobile financial platform as a hosted model.

This new approach will provide reduced operational costs, faster time to market and a fully managed mobile financial platform to the Banks/Financial Institutions and Network Operators in Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. This will further extend benefits to the partners in the ecosystem, Retailers or Merchants/Billers and end consumers, towards rapid uptake of mobile payment services in these countries.

Comviva’s new offering is to drive three fold benefits provide greater access to banking services for underbanked segments, enable small and medium banks to remain competitive and maximize reach, and boost proliferation of mobile financial services among service providers including mobile network operators, retailers and other network providers, for greater consumer outreach.

Srinivas Nidugondi, Head of Mobile Financial Solutions, Comviva commented, "We are delighted to announce the availability of our mobiquity mobile financial solution as a hosted model. In today’s competitive world, it is imperative for banks, financial institutions and network operators to keep up to speed with changes in the mobile payment systems that they rely on for their continued operations. We believe that our offering will have a far reaching and positive impact on the economic and development indices of the markets we plan to launch our hosted services.”

“Today, approximately 35% of mobile phone users have no access to formal financial services. In a world with 7 billion people, there are over 6 billion mobile phone connections, but only 1.8 billion bank accounts. Comviva’s mobiquity mobile financial platform on a hosted model will enable banks and mobile operators to address this major market gap by delivering affordable financial services to unbanked and underserved segments,” further added Srinivas.

Comviva has partnered with best in class service providers to offer highly available mobile financial services platform to banks, financial institutions and network operators, to meet their customer requirements and for faster adoption of electronic payments in these countries.

The increase in customer strength actively using mobile banking and payment services requires an innovative model to simplify the operational life for banks and telcos and also allow a faster turnaround.  It is estimated that mobile payments will see more than $171.5 billion transactions this year a rise of over 60 percent on 2011's $105.9 billion with 212.2 million people using some form of mobile payment service.