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Get the latest announcements from MEF Members across the mobile ecosystem globally in this weekly review of member news…

Telecoms giant Orange has launched its own mobile-based bank

Telecommunications corporation Orange has launched its own bank, it was announced Thursday.

Orange said its mobile-based retail bank is available in France and offers customers current accounts, bank cards, overdraft lending, a free insurance package and a savings account.

“With Orange Bank, this is an important new chapter in our history: Orange is now also a bank. A 100 percent mobile-based bank that is dedicated to providing an incomparable user experience,” Stéphane Richard, chairman and chief executive of Orange, said in a statement Thursday.

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Huawei’s mobile AI technology is key to its GDPR preparations

With one in seven companies still unprepared for GDPR, Huawei is in the enviable position of having a “three pillar” plan to safeguard itself ahead of the May deadline.

The Chinese electronics giant not only wants to be compliant but to to set a new standard for how things should be done, according to the company’s chief marketing officer for Western Europe, Andrew Garrihy.

The multi-pronged strategy covers three specific areas: design processes, business operations and, crucially, its hardware.

Having already curbed the iPhone’s momentum in China, Huawei is now the world’s number three smartphone brand behind Apple and Samsung with an 8.3% market share according to Gartner data.

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Partnership with Infomedia opens-up Bango Platform to More Digital Merchants

Bango announces a strategic partnership and commercial deal with Infomedia, to increase the number of digital merchants that benefit from the Bango Platform for mobile payments. The agreement strengthens Bango’s position as the payments platform of choice for Direct Carrier Billing (DCB), the preferred payment method for merchants.

Infomedia provides a managed services platform that delivers DCB for a wide range of branded, third-party content. This is becoming widely adopted as operators look to grow the portfolio of content offered to their customers. Through this partnership, the Infomedia service will be integrated with the Bango Platform, enabling Infomedia customers and partners to rapidly scale by launching DCB across multiple operators already integrated to Bango.

Bango CMO, Anil Malhotra said: “Infomedia’s exceptional quality and proven relationships make them the right partner for Bango to expand the availability of the Bango Platform to more branded merchants. They have a great track record in DCB with operators in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. We look forward to adding business from Infomedia merchants including WWE, Mcafee, Intel, and Hopster to the Bango Platform.”

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Mozilla finds IoT optimism, privacy fears clash

The Mozilla Foundation has released the results of a new study that claims that while consumers are ready to use mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, users remain divided in opinion over a connected future.

The research found that the more tech savvy people are, the more optimistic they feel about a connected future but the loss of privacy worries citizens worldwide.

According to the research, respondents who identified themselves as proficient with technology were the most likely to be optimistic about a connected future, while those who considered themselves least proficient — 31 percent in total — said they were “scared as hell” of the idea.

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Infobip Delivers One Third of All A2P SMS Traffic across India

Infobip, the global communications platform for business, today announced that it has been delivering four billion A2P SMS per month across India since the start of this year, 30 per cent of all A2P traffic in the region. Infobip has seen the surge in demand for A2P SMS driven by adoption of the technology by businesses in the finance and retail sectors.

“Banking in India has been transformed by the mobile payments revolution, with consumers and business able to make and confirm transactions easily and securely via SMS,” said Harsha Solanki, Managing Director for India, at Infobip. “As a result, a large number of banks across India have established service partnerships for A2P messaging, enabling them to authorise payments and send notifications to their customers.

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