From CTIA’s Wireless IT and Entertainment event this week, OpenMarket, a subsidiary of Amdocs, introduced a new release of its messaging and financial processing platform that it said can make operators’ billing and payment systems as good or better than the smooth-running credit card transaction network.

OpenMarket 2.0 is designed to simplify transactions between mobile content providers and individual consumers, also known as direct-to-consumer (D2C) mobile commerce. It improves the integrity of the financial data associated with mobile transactions. With this new version, the company can enable automated authorization for digital content transactions. It also has new resources for mobile commerce management and support for multimedia message service (MMS).

Steve Shivers, general manager of OpenMarket, said the traditional method of mobile operators to use short message service (SMS) aggregation for processing mobile transactions just won’t cut it in the long run.

“Credit card processing is a much more financially sound system than SMS aggregation, and OpenMarket intends to be better than credit card processing,” he said.

OpenMarket features what the company is calling the first pre-authorization application protocol interface (API), which can provide a patent-pending profile called an AuthScore. The AuthScore incorporates factors such as the subscriber’s purchasing history, spending limit, type of payment plan, and refund activity. Content providers can access OpenMarket’s predictive algorithm to assess a subscriber’s ability to pay for their digital content. OpenMarket estimates that this technology can help content providers improve transaction success rates by up to 10 % or more.

OpenMarket’s customers are the content providers, and mobile operators are its partners. “Unless payment through the mobile channels can compete favorably against an efficient Internet and other industries, mobile commerce won’t become a major media channel, and operators may not be able to keep their position in the value chain,” Shivers said. “So our mission is to make sure [that process] becomes efficient and that operators can stay well-entrenched in the middle of that chain.”

Shivers said operators need to recognize that one of their primary competitive fronts is not against other operators but against financial payment services. “It is a pretty big paradigm shift to be a very competitive media channel and payment provider rather than a competitive communications network,” he said. “The key to whether or not operators can make that transition is whether or not they recognize it is a strategic decision they need to make.”

The company also runs a customer center that provides real-time, consolidated reporting on messaging and financial transactions as well as a Short Code Registration tool that enables content provides to submit new short code programs online.

OpenMarket was being incubated inside Qpass when Amdocs bought Qpass in April of 2006 for $275 million. It will be expanding its MMS connectivity from two leading U.S. wireless operators to other top network operators in the coming months.