UK bank testing Kiwi text system

By RICHARD PAMATATAU

Wellington companies Run The Red and Proaxiom are testing their text message-based credit system with an undisclosed British bank.

Run The Red director Ben Northrop said the bank was eight weeks into a pilot scheme using the text message system for alerts to cellphones for fraud, funds transfer, overdraft status and loan approvals.

The new service was successfully tested internally by the credit cards division of the bank in Europe and is now being tested in the wider bank.

If successful it will be rolled out to all of the bank's customers.

"We looked at the market and saw that Run The Red, who themselves worked with New Zealand's largest public company Telecom, had developed a reliable and secure text message application that we saw could be used to develop additional offerings for our clients and their customers," said Mike Price, technical director of Proaxiom which has wide experience in providing technology offerings to the credit industry.

The companies are talking to companies both here and overseas about how they can text message. Other banks have expressed interest in the technology due to its potential to reduce credit card fraud.

Northrop said the system had been designed in a very basic way so that any bank customer could use it on basic text-capable phones.

Fee options were still being worked out, but if the bank proceeds the companies may be paid on a revenue share basis, monthly fee or a combination, said Northrop.

Proaxiom has one banking customer in the UK - National Australia Banking Group Europe - and has worked with most of New Zealand's banks and many finance and retail organisations. Run The Red's success in the text message field has included Txt4Tips, a racing information service promoted by the TAB, Telecom's America's Cup Text Challenge, which generated more than a million texts and, most recently, Game On, an interactive rugby game developed for Telecom, which has notched up more than a 700,000 text messages.