Cricket chooses Valista's managed payments service to power it's off-deck mobile content business...

Valista (www.valista.com), the leading independent provider of merchandizing, payments, settlement solutions and managed services, accelerating the growth of digital commerce, today announced that Cricket Communications, Inc, a leading U.S. based provider of unlimited wireless services, has selected Valista’s next generation Managed Payments Service to enable its off-deck mobile content business. Valista’s payments service ensures that consumers are aware of exactly what they are paying for when purchasing content off-deck (from a third-party). The service includes real-time authentication and authorization, which prevents unsolicited charging and provides robust transaction management, high throughput support and superior partner settlement.

“One of our key initiatives is to allow Cricket customers to participate in the wide choice of premium off-portal content available in the marketplace today” said Larry Atwell, director of product development at Cricket. “The Valista Premium Billing Solution is a key component to making this happen. Valista’s solution allows easy integration with content aggregators, real-time billing for premium content, partner settlement tools, and business intelligence reporting, as well as online content purchase history for customer care and the user. Opening up premium off-portal content is a win-win for the entire ecosystem: the customer, the content provider, the aggregator and the carrier.”

Valista’s Managed Payments Service will act as a bridge between external aggregators, content providers and Cricket’s internal billing infrastructure. The service utilizes Valista’s industry leading payments technology (Valista PaymentsPlus™) and its advanced revenue sharing and settlement solution (Valista SettlementPlus™). It is a hosted model run as a managed service, with US and European-based secure data centers providing 24X7access to support personnel.

According to Raomal Perera, CEO of Valista, “Valista’s Managed Payments Service for Operators controls access to the billing infrastructure with transactional, standards-based APIs. It helps prevent revenue leakage with real-time authentication and authorization, refund management and integration to financial systems. It also provides comprehensive settlement and reconciliation services allowing automated, accurate settlement calculations with all partners and supports refunds and reversals automatically reflected in settlement statements.”

Valista has a proven track record in providing managed services on behalf of such key customers as AT&T in the USA. The Managed Payments Service is based on the award winning Valista payments and settlement platforms, already in use by some of the world’s largest mobile operators including Vodafone UK, NTT DoCoMo, France Telecom, 3 and Orange.