Cellum to set sail in Singapore

Asian expansion creates more business opportunity to the Hungarian based Cellum.
The mobile payment provider has just opened its newest subsudiary in Singapore and planes to capitalize on its strategic location in the region.

"Asian markets seem especially interested in our solutions, and we see enormous growth potential there. Our Singapore center focuses on APAC, including Japan but excluding China. It is a vibrant market, the state of Singapore has an ambition to turn the country into a mobile transaction hub, similarly to how they turned it into a logistics and trade hub in the previous half century. I am very happy to announce that we have concluded our first deal and will launch in 2016.' - János Kóka, CEO of Cellum confirmed when D&T asked him about the reason of setting up a new unit in Singapore.

Calleum has signed the first contracts in Indonesia with two large players: Anabatic, a leading technology company, and Evercoss, the country’s no. 1 manufacturer of affordable smart devices. Cellum expects to launch services there in 2016. In Thailand, they have been operating a mobile wallet with great success for almost a year and are in talks with some key banks and merchants on  launching further services.

China is a special case. Cellum has started mapping out opportunities and tailoring products for that market. Some 600 million people are expected to gain access to m-commerce services in the next 5 years, that is an unbelievable number. 'We think the secure platform and white-label business model that we offer to banks and merchants will be a key competitive edge.' - Kóka added.

Security is among the leading priorities at Cellum too. The company has developed a unique, patented card vault technology called Split Secret. Kóka said proudly: "Nowadays people are talking about how Apple Pay and similar services use tokenization to protect card data – we have been doing that for a decade. But our real breakthrough has been a data fragmentation method which stores sensitive information in multiple physical locations. This way, there is no single database that could be hacked, an attacker would need to find and penetrate all locations and steal all fragments. And even so, the data is still encrypted.This is a truly revolutionary technology that has successfully maintained a zero percent fraud rate for a decade."

Innovative companies in the IT business are under constant pressure to materialize their R&D efforts. Engineers at Cellum have produced many remarkable inventions. An example is motionQR, which received high publicity when first unveiled it in Las Vegas two years ago. It allows the secure storage of picture IDs and similar documents as an animated QR code.

Cellum's Festipay is the number one festival card solution in Hungary: leading festivals like Sziget, VOLT, Balaton Sound, Gourmet and EFOTT are all using it. Visitors of Delta Festival in Marseille, France and Untold Festival in Cluj, Romania can also enjoy the benefits of Festipay services. In 2016, Festipay will continue to grow in the European market, and also develop solutions using wearables like watches and wristbands, which can be integrated with venue access functions.