Oct 22, 2009
Telrock plc
Telrock are pleased to announce the launch of a great new service that enables customers of a major TSYS International client to securely activate their credit cards via SMS. The service requires random digits of security information to be sent to Telrock via SMS, prompted by instructions printed on each card carrier. Information received by the application is matched against the customer’s account and their credit card automatically activated.
By making card activation so simple and convenient to complete, cardholders are more likely to activate and start spending sooner; generating more value for the issuer. This new service further demonstrates how mobile technology, specifically SMS, can improve the customer service experience, increase value, and reduce operational costs.
Aug 26, 2009
2009 Mobile Content Awards
Telrock are very pleased to have been nominated for two categories in this year's prestigious Mobile Content Awards. Telrock are in the categories for "Best Technology Innovation" and "Best Mobile Money Services", alongside other leading technology providers such as RIM Blackberry, Acision, Novarra, Mobile Money and dotMobi.
Telrock's Managing Director, Russell Robinson, commented "We are delighted to be nominated alongside such a number of market leading technology provider. Telrock have been at the forefront of providing leading edge, customer centric mobile technology for a number of years now and are really looking forward to becoming market leaders in this space"
The awards will take place on the 10th of September, in London, and will be attended by Russell Robinson and Lindsay Smith (CTO).
Jul 9, 2009
Telrock, the mobile technology company, announced today that it has entered into a three year agreement with the Payment Management division of Capita, the UK's leading provider of BPO and integrated professional support service solutions. Telrock will provide its textDebit™ mobile text messaging platform to Capita’s comprehensive client base, where it will be marketed as SMS Plus.
This agreement extends an earlier partnership which will initially see four of Capita’s clients use Telrock’s mobile platform with others committed to follow. This will enable citizens to receive reminders around services or payments and if required, to securely pay for services such as council tax or housing rents via SMS messaging. These Authorities will implement textDebit™ (SMS Plus) as a new and innovative communication channel alongside already established channels. It is expected that many more Local Authorities will sign up to the service over the coming months.
One Local Authority currently using textDebit™ notifies its citizens via SMS when a payment is overdue, allowing them to reply to the message and authorise payment from a previously registered debit or credit card, the details of which are securely held in encrypted form.
Commenting on the announcement, Russell Robinson, Managing Director of Telrock, said: “Many consumers do not wish to set-up a Direct Debit due to the loss of financial control and the worry of incurring bank charges for failed payments. These consumers see textDebit™ as a great alternative, providing them with “in-pocket” notification, including reminders of when a payment is due and the ability to simply reply at a time when they know sufficient funds are available to clear the payment. With clients demonstrating that the use of textDebit™ encourages 70% of customers to make a payment within 48 hours of receiving their SMS payment request, there is huge potential for improving revenue collection."
This offers one of the most effective payment channel outside of Direct Debit, a method of payment which is typically adopted by only around 60% of customers paying bills, leaving almost half the customer base as potential users of textDebit™”. He added: “This agreement is a clear endorsement of our technology and gives us access to Capita’s extensive Local Authority client base, a sector where we believe the take up of mobile payment services will continue to grow as councils see the benefit of adding this to their existing payment platforms.”
Chris Cooper, Operations Director of Capita Payment Management, added: "Capita are delighted to partner with Telrock in order to provide our clients with leading edge SMS technology as a component of our payment management solution. We see clear benefits for our customers including efficiency gains, reduction in paper-based communication and an increase in the overall return on investment"
Capita’s managed service has been established since 2001 and includes a range of products to process card payments via the internet, touch-tone telephone, SMS text, speech recognition and on-site Chip & PIN. Managed by a dedicated team, the solution is used by over 170 organisations, who between them take over 1.1 million payments each month with a total value of almost £82 million.
Capita’s managed service products are certified to PCI DSS Level 1 and Capita is proud to have been the first major supplier to the public sector to have achieved this standard.
Jun 25, 2009
Telrock Plc
Telrock today announced that it has embarked on another implementation on a mobile managed, prepaid money transfer card with their strategic partner TSYS. The prepaid card will initially be launched in France during Q3 2009 and sold nationally by a major French telecom service operator.
With outstanding results in the U.S. market, Telrock is supporting the European expansion; with France being the first market to offer consumers the ability to purchase prepaid cards to make international transfers. The card will be scheme branded through Visa and will be distributed in dual card packs through major retail chains. The first card is loaded with value while the second card can be sent to relatives abroad. The initial target markets include Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
Telrock has enabled its unique, mobile money transfer functionality to enable cardholders to load cash onto their prepaid account, which can then be transferred on to the second card (or on to another primary card), using SMS. The cardholder and the recipient receive SMS remittance, in their local language, confirming the funds are available.
"This extends Telrock’s presence in to France and extends the TSYS EMEA partnership to further demonstrate their ability and experience as a global mobile payment service provider," said Russell Robinson, Managing Director.
May 26, 2009
Telrock Plc
Following a joint implementation of Telrocks mobile payment platform with one of Europe's largest energy suppliers, Telrock is pleased to report the first SMS payment of £284.37 was made in an unprecedented 63 seconds.
Telrock's textDebit system enables customers to register their mobile phone and bank account details to make bill payments using the SMS facility on their mobile phone. The customer receives an SMS identifying the bill issuer, payment amount and due date. To make the payment, the customer simply responds to the reminder text message. The user does not need to download software to their phone, neither are they required to send any sensitive information by text.
Russell Robinson, Managing Director of Telrock, commented: "Through textDebit, we have made the payment process as simple as possible, just read and reply to a text message - no delay, no paper, no call centres. We are confident that a customer paying their bill in 63 seconds following bill presentment is the fastest ever recorded in the retail energy market outside of Direct Debit and proves we have the right system in today's economy. The payment process through textDebit means customers pay faster and the operational costs of managing these customers is much reduced".
Over 20 UK merchants are now signed up to textDebit to collect payments for Credit Cards, Energy Supply, Council Tax and Government Housing Rent.
May 25, 2009
Telrock
Russell Robinson, Telrock’s Managing Director to speak at the 2009 European Metering, Billing and CRM Conference.
Russell Robinson’s presentation at the American Metering, Billing and CIS conference in Miami was such a success, he has been invited back to speak at the 2009 European Metering, Billing and CRM Conference. The conference is being held in Barcelona and will run from the 6th-8th October.
To find out more or to attend this event you can visit: http://www.metering-europe.com
Apr 20, 2009
Telrock plc
Russell Robinson, Managing Director and co-founder of Telrock was invited to speak at the Mobile Payments Industry Conference held in London on the 20th April.
Telrock was pleased to be invited to talk alongside a handful of speakers including; Mary Carol Harris, Head of Mobile for Visa Europe and Terrie Smith, Vice President, Mobile centre of excellence, MasterCard.
The conference covered a wide spectrum of mobile payments initiatives from many continents and is a true sign that the mobile payments market offers some excellent benefits to customers, merchants and billers alike. Telrock was one of the few companies speaking, able to confirm its platform has been used by millions of customers and has already processed several million pounds via mobile payments.
Russell Robinson commented: "It was a great opportunity to discuss what Telrock has experienced in the mobile payments space across the Banking, Utility, Local Government and Retail Payments industries. It was an intimate event and pleasing to talk alongside some of the best thinkers and well positioned businesses to make mobile payments happen globally. I would like to thank Visiongain for the invitation to contribute to their event".
Jan 20, 2009
Metering Billing America 2009 - Miami
Following Telrock and Scottish and Southern Energy's presentation at 'Metering and Billing Europe 2008' they have been invited to speak at the sister conference in America, 'Metering Billing America 2009'. Now into its 10th year, 'Metering and Billing America' has established itself as the industry's foremost metering and customer service event. The event is being held in Miami on the 22-25 March, 2009.
Like in Amsterdam Telrock's Managing Director Russell Robinson will be speaking alongside Scottish and Southern Energy's Mark Cowtan to discuss their partnership and give insight into how Telrocks utility self service platform has been incorporated into Scottish and Southern Energy operations to enable customer own meter readings. This presentation will also cover how the Telrock mobile platform can be used for secure bill presentment / payment via text messaging.
To find out more or to attend this event you can visit: http://www.spintelligent-events.com
Dec 12, 2008
Telrock
Telrock's North American data centres, in New York and Oklahoma, have opened for business with the first batch of applications released to production this month. Lindsay Smith, CTO, said "Extensive testing of our new infrastructure has demonstrated exceptional load capacity".
Oct 10, 2008
Telrock
Telrock have attained ISO27001 certification status. Stefan Turney, Senior Project Manager, said "I am pleased Telrock's Information Security Management System (ISMS) has been aproved as fully compliant with the ISO27001 Information Security Standards. BSI, Telrock's auditors, raised no minor non-conformities and commented that "Telrock have an excellent attitude to information security". The outcome is particulary pleasing for us as our main challenge was to align our processes with the standards, but still remain agile."
Sep 17, 2008
TSYS Risk Xchange 2008 - Georgia
Telrock has been invited to speak at the TSYS Risk Xchange 2008 conference at Pine Mountain, Georgia on October 14th-16th.
The session will cover how Telrock's mobile services can manage fraud, improve collections and reduce call center traffic. Telrock who are also specialists in mobile payments will demonstrate how cardholders can use their cell phones to make payments, respond to fraud alerts and request account information; services that are already integrated and live on the TSYS processing platform.
Aug 31, 2008
Telrock
Telrock's new US data centres in New York and Oklahoma are online and will be released to our first North American clients in November. Lindsay Smith, CTO, said "We have designed everything to be exactly how we want it from from the ground up. All hardware is tripley redundant, with hot switching. We have continued with a pure Linux instructure and OpenSource where possible."
Jul 10, 2008
Telrock
Telrock plc (“Telrock”), the mobile applications technology company focused on the financial services and utilities sectors, announced today it has collected more than £1 million from Royal Bank of Scotland's MINT credit card customers via its textDebit™ mobile payments service.
Telrock’s partnership with MINT was formed in September 2006, when Mint launched its mobile payment offering. The service, which uses Telrock’s mobile payments technology, allows MINT credit card holders to request account balances, and mini statements, receive credit card bills and make payments to their account, all by text message through their mobile phone.
textDebit™, Telrock’s SMS based payment authorisation service, enables cardholders to be alerted of payments that are due on their account via SMS. The customer can then simply reply to the SMS to authorise payment to their supplier/issuer.
Analysis of the £1 million collected from MINT customers shows that using textDebit™ improves the speed at which credit card bills are paid. 2.3% of customers paid within one minute of receiving the payment request, a further 13.5% paid within five minutes and 10% paid within 30 minutes. A quarter of customers paid within the first week and only 12% of customers took longer than a week to pay.
Russell Robinson, Managing Director at Telrock, commented: “This is an excellent example of the rapid take-up of SMS based payments services and demonstrates that using textDebit™ improves the speed at which customers settle their credit card bills, by reducing the effort required to make a payment. There is currently no other payment channel that will automatically notify a customer, in less than 10 seconds, wherever they are in the world, that a payment is due. This is not only easier for customers, but significantly improves supplier/issuer cash-flow for credit card companies, allowing them to collect payments more efficiently.”
Jun 2, 2008
Metering Europe - Amsterdam
Telrock and Scottish and Southern Energy been invited to attend 'Metering Europe 2008 Conference' which is now in its 10th edition and is the largest utility event on metering, billing/CRM of electricity, water and gas. The event will be held at the RAI Convention Centre in Amsterdam on the 22-24th September.
Telrock's Managing Director Russell Robinson will be speaking alongside Scottish and Southern Energy's Mark Cowtan to discuss their partnership and give insight into how Telrocks utility self service platform has been incorporated into Scottish and Southern Energy operations to enable customer own meter readings. This presentation will also cover how the Telrock mobile platform can be used for secure bill presentment / payment via text messaging.
To find out more or attend this event you can visit: www.metering-europe.com
Apr 19, 2008
Gartner Research
Gartner has released its annual report on Cool Vendors in Energy and Utilities, 2008 in which Telrock has once again been headlined as a leading player in the provision of mobile services to the Utilities Industry.
Russell Robinson Managing Director of Telrock commented "With Gartner being one of the leading research analysts we are extremely pleased to see Telrock listed as their Cool Vendor in this space. We have been developing our solutions for over 6 years now so its excellent so see the large research firms acknowledging our technology.
This report can be purchased directly from Gartner Research www.gartner.com
Apr 12, 2008
Gartner Research
Gartner has released an in depth report on "Short Message Service as Customer Interaction Channel for Utilities" in which Telrock has been headlined as a leading player in the provision of mobile services to the Utilities Industry.
This report can be purchased directly from Gartner Research www.gartner.com
Mar 22, 2008
N X 100 messages second
Version 5.0 of the Telrock Messaging Platform has been released into production. Lindsay Smith, CTO of Telrock, says: "As our throughput requirements continually grow, the performance of our software needs to keep pace. We needed the capability to scale out to add capacity so we added the ability to deploy Messaging Platforms in parallel with all servers taking a share of the load - as well as making further enhancements to the througput of each. Load testing has shown throughput capability of 100 messages per second, per single CPU server. Telrock's focus is very much on scaling; scaling for throughput and scaling for users - it's a great problem to solve".
Feb 19, 2008
Daniel Wolfe - American Banker
The card transaction processor Total System Services Inc. plans to offer its North American clients a mobile phone account management service using technology from Telrock PLC.
Feb 15, 2008
Cardline
Total System Services Inc., a processor known as TSYS based in Columbus, Ga., announced today it has signed an agreement with London-based Telrock Plc., a mobile-phone technology company, to provide text- based banking services in North America. TSYS now is offering Telrock's text-based alerts and account notifications to card issuers, Cyle Mims, a TSYS spokesperson, tells CardLine. Telrock can give banks the ability to send fraud alerts automatically to their customers and to enable customers to set up their own automatic alerts, he says. For example, a bank's customer could ask to be notified every time his credit card has a charge of more than $50 so that he could approve it or report it as fraudulent, Mims says. Customers also may use the system to have account information sent via text message to their phones. TSYS chose Telrock because TSYS has a relationship with the company in the United Kingdom.
"It has worked well, so we decided it would be a good option to use them in North America," Mims says.
Feb 13, 2008
Thames Water Utilities
Serving 13 million customers across London and the Southeast, Thames Water Utilities (TW) is the UK's largest water and wastewater services company. TW are currently piloting Telrock's meter read service 'textRead' which enables customers to submit meter readings using text messaging on standard mobile phones. The pilot is currently targeting those 'hard to reach' customers where readings have not been received for a period of 18 months or longer. Early trial results are extremely positive and it is anticipated that at the end of the 6 month trial the service will be extended to cover a wider audience.
Feb 7, 2008
Telrock
"Following the closure of the recent placement of stock in Telrock along with the recent agreement of terms for a long term contract with one of the UK's leading utilities and an agreement with one of the world's largest credit card processors, the company is looking forward to considerable expansion in the banking and utility sectors, driving substantial traffic through its payment authorisation and other software in 2008; making money mobile."
Sep 6, 2007
PayPoint
Telrock has entered into an exclusive agreement with PayPoint, the UK's leading cash and internet payments company, that will enable consumers to pay bills and top up their mobile phones via text message.
Telrock will provide its mobile payments system textDebit? to PayPoint under a revenue-sharing agreement. Technology provided by Telrock enables end users to make secure payments to clients of PayPoint using SMS text messaging. Consumers will pre-register a debit, credit or pre-paid card which can then be used to pay a variety of bills such as energy, telecommunications or water, or top up a prepaid mobile phone.
Aug 1, 2007
Telrock
After seeing continued growth in the requirement for its innovative mobile services coupled with new client wins and strategic partnerships with some of the world's largest organisations Telrock has decided to expand its development and support capabilities by moving to a new larger office space in the City of London, UK. Telrock's new address is now:
Jan 1, 2007
Scottish and Southern Energy
One of the UK's largest energy suppliers Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) has completed a 2 year agreement for a fully managed SMS solution provided by industry leader Telrock. The service will be implemented on a two-tiered approach. Initially, SSE will use Telrock's mobile based meter read collection service textRead. Following implementation of the customer read collection service, Telrock's mobile payment system textDebit™ will be integrated to offer a complete cycle of SMS meter read submission and SMS bill payment through one managed process.
Telrock has been working with a number of major suppliers in the UK market including British Gas who has over 16M customers. Telrock has been successfully managing the textRead application for British Gas customers since February 2004.
Jan 1, 2007
Royal Bank of Scotland
RBS and Natwest customers can now sign up to a service powered by telrock which alerts them, by SMS, to suspected fraudulent activity which may be taking place on their card allowing the issue to be resolved quickly and efficiently.
Sep 1, 2006
TSYS
Telrock has entered into a 3 year contract with TSYS grants Telrock exclusive rights to offer its mobile payment authorisation services textDebit™ via mobile phones to TSYS clients in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) region.
The EMEA region has been further extended due to the recent acquisition by TSYS of Card Tech (now TSYS Card Tech). Card Tech manages the PRIME credit card processing system, which is equivalent to TSYS' TS2 platform.
Sep 1, 2006
MINT
MINT™ has launched the Telrock designed and built mobile payments service allowing MINT™ cardholders to:
...all by text message.
For further information on this service please visit www.mint.co.uk/mobile
Aug 1, 2006
Telrock
After several months of audits and security screening Telrock has been certified as compliant with the PCI data security standards set out by Visa and MasterCard. This certification allows Telrock to launch its mobile payments technology, textDebit™, to banks globally.
Mar 1, 2006
Royal Bank of Scotland
Royal Bank of Scotland Group has chosen Telrock to provide a fully integrated mobile payments and SMS based account servicing channel for its credit card brand MINT™ under a 2 year agreement.