Mobile phones have increasingly become tools that consumers use for banking, payments, budgeting, and shopping. Given the rapid pace of developments in the area of mobile finance, the Federal Reserve Board began conducting annual surveys of consumers’ use of mobile financial services in 2011. This 78-page report, “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services” (March, 2015) examines trends in the adoption and use of mobile banking, payments, and shopping behavior and how the emergence of mobile financial services affects consumers’ interaction with financial institutions.
Clickatell Announces $12 Million Funding Round from Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures
Clickatell, has announced it has secured $12 million in a series B round of venture funding led by Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures. The funding will be used to continue the company’s expansion into new service areas and geographies where automated, just-in-time mobile messaging is powering huge gains in customer engagement and value and opening the door to new mobile transactions. The company provides Personalized Priority Messaging as a service.
Clickatell is a profitable company with more than 13,000 customers that utilize its mobile messaging API’s and global delivery infrastructure to reach and respond to customers across some 869 networks in 223 countries and territories. Personalized Priority Messaging via Clickatell is embedded into virtually any business process to increase an organization’s capacity to offer new levels of customer help and engagement using mobile text messaging (SMS).
“Clickatell was early in recognizing the immense power of mobile messaging to transform the customer experience. With the capacity to reach some 70 percent of the world’s population, Personalized Priority Messaging can help companies of all sizes create more welcoming and helpful brands by delivering just the right message, to the right person at the right time,” said Pieter de Viliers, CEO and co-founder of Clickatell. “We’re excited by our continued relationship with Sequoia Capital and value their insight into various markets and sectors. We are also happy to welcome to our team DAG Ventures whom we enjoyed working with on this transaction. Mobile is the new medium of consumer engagement, and brands from Lagos to London are recognizing this. Clickatell is very well positioned to become an even stronger leader in Business-to-Consumer Mobile messaging and transaction enablement. We are excited by the future mobile has to offer.”
A leading provider to the global financial services industry, Clickatell is innovating new Personalized Priority Messaging-based services to enable financial transactions over the mobile phone in developing countries. In the United States, it is launching a new web-based solution that will enable small and medium sized companies to far more easily deploy Personalized Priority Messaging in their business. Its platform is used by organizations worldwide to deliver targeted, time-sensitive alerts, notification, reminders, responses, updates, answers, verifications and promotions with unprecedented levels of receipt, readership and response.
“Global adoption of mobile messaging as a powerful channel of engagement continues to astound,” said Mike Goguen, Managing Partner at Sequoia Capital. “Some 6.1 trillion SMS messages were sent in 2010, triple the volume of 2007. Clickatell continues to be a leader in this market, with both the vision and the execution capabilities to realize the opportunities inherent in this market.”
“Clickatell is well positioned to take advantage of the continuing growth of mobile messaging in both emerging and developed markets,” said Nicholas K. Pianim, Managing Director at DAG Ventures. “New Clickatell solutions to power mobile transactions in Africa and increase U.S. small business adoption of Personalized Priority Messaging represent exciting new opportunities for growth.”
Source: PR Web