Interview With Nguyen Tran, Co-Founder And CTO Of mobizCOM

Vietnam-based mobile business tech firm, MOBIZcom was just in Singapore a few days ago at unConference Singapore 2009. We met up with the DFJ Vina Capital-funded company and spoke to Nguyen Tran, one of the founders of mobizCOM and their CTO.

Hi Nguyen Tran, tell us what is mobizCOM.

mobizCOM is a mobile business technology joint stock company which was established in March 2006. mobizCOM’s aspiration is to become the provider to financial service institutions the security infrastructure for mobile-based transactions. We provide value-added services and help build the consumer confidence in using non-cash transactions with our technology.

What is your technology based on?

Our technology is based on the invention of OTAC (One Time Authentication & Certification), an international patent-pending technology. OTAC uses the complex algorithm to authenticate the right persons who has the right to issue the transaction and certify that the SMS message has been sent by the authenticated person and the time it was sent.

The authenticating and certifying message does not contain the sender’s personal and sensitive information. The OTAC code, automatically generated using multiple authentication factor algorithm, is valid only for a single transaction and is useless within seconds, unusable for hackers.

Though highly secured, it is very easy to use with our user-friendly interface, simple actions. There is no point-of-sales (POS) involved, saving the investment cost.

Embedding this technology into a mobile payment system, we have developed various products to serve different financial purposes:

mobizPAY, secured by OTAC, supports payments by using mobile handset to initiate payment, query account, cash withdraw / topup anytime, anywhere easily with the high level of secure and anti- fraud transaction. It is the main tool for payment solutions for retail stores, restaurants, taxi fares, etc.
mobizBANK, also secured by OTAC, supports all banking transactions right at mobile handset. Fund transfers, account query, payments, … all can be done from one’s handset with high security level and user-friendly interface.

Outside the mobizCOM office building.

You seem to have launched many products with more to come. Tell us about your various products and how your portfolio fits together.

mobizSTOCK, the stock application in which customers can trade and query stocks via mobile phone anytime anywhere. Securities floor is now at your mobile phone with all functions of an actual securities floor.