In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week Richard H Harris, Chief Executive and Co-founder of Ensygnia talks about their unique mobile payments system; MEFTV spoke to Richard at length about their business at MWC earlier this year.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JaRJ5IYJ0s]
.
What does Ensygnia do?
Our Onescan app and platform enables mobile payments online, in-store and on-the-go and has applications for log-in, authentication and mobile identity. In the payments world it allows customers and prospects to typically go from looking to buying in less than ten seconds.
When did you launch and what growth have you seen?
We launched at mobile world congress in 2013 and over the past year signed major agreements with partners and secured a number of commercial deal which are in the progress of going live. The company itself has grown extensively over the last year. We’ve gone from less than 10 people involved in the project to over 60. We’ve also had two successful rounds of investment
What are your main goals?
The main goal of Ensygnia is to reduce frustrations for both consumers and merchants. We want to make life easier for consumers and improve sales conversion rates and security for merchants.
Where do you see Ensygnia in three years’ time?
I hope to see Ensygnia IPO in around 3 years’ time, with a whole new range of services and applications.
What aspect of mobile is most exciting to you right now?
The aspect of mobile that is most exciting to us is the pure explosion of its use – it’s everywhere. Even in developing countries the smartphone is becoming ubiquitous. What’s also exciting to us, is we have developed a solution that addresses the security and privacy concerns that have emerged around transactions and interaction. Our solution’s architecture precludes the common security concerns – there is no central database to hack or usernames and passwords to steal. It’s exciting to us because we’re taking a device – a smartphone – that is becoming ever and ever more common and allowing people to use it as a secure and trusted way to interact.
What’s the most critical issue that will hit mobile within the next 12 months?
I think the critical issues regarding mobile are around identity and privacy. We have seen over the last few years an increasing number of cyber-attacks and breaches. Combine that with a public rebellion against big-data – information being held up in the cloud unknown to us and being used by companies we don’t know and in ways we haven’t approved. The mobile industry needs to deal with the issue of providing a secure and trusted experience – which is something I think our company does. We put privacy back into the hands of consumers – allowing people to share only what is required and nothing more whatever the interaction may be.
Apart from your own, which mobile companies are the ones to watch in the year ahead?
I think the potential explosion of Bitcoin apps is the thing to watch out for. Bitcoin has the potential to be exceptionally big indeed. I don’t think there is any one player providing that technology at the moment. Virtual currency apps in general are very intriguing.
Richard H Harris is Chief Executive and Co-founder of Ensygnia.
Follow him on Twitter.
