Proxama (LON:PROX) shares surged more than 20% after news the mobile marketing and payments specialist signed an exclusive three-year deal with Brazilian Bank card manufacturer, Valid.
Chief executive Neil Garner spoke to Proactive Investors to explain why the Brazilian deal can help Proxama’s shares hit the back of the net ahead of this summer’s World Cup.
Jeremy Naylor: How does this deal benefit Proxama shareholders?
Neil Garner: We think it's fantastic, because obviously we’ve got a small office in New York and we’re mainly based in Europe.
I think everyone can see, particularly with the World Cup coming up, that the Brazilian market and particularly the South American market, is a fantastic one.
We saw that partnering up with an amazing company like Valid, that is already listed on the Brazilian Stock Exchange, is a great way to go – they can essentially be a channel for our technology and services into that South American market.
JN: This is not the only deal you’ve announced recently. We saw a big rise in shares recently after a deal with Cryptomathic. What did that deal provide?
Neil Garner: We’ve known Cryptomathic for a while, so for those of you that don’t know, Cryptomathic actually provides a lot of the technology that is used by major financial services to help with issuing cards; all the cryptographic technology that’s used for issuing chip cards and also technology for authorising those cards.
So, between what we’ve got and what they’ve got, we can now put in place a solution for banks. Where they can literally augment what they have today with the Cryptomathic in the back office, plus our front end software, to be able to enable mobile devices to become contactless payment devices.
Effectively, to use your mobile phone to replace the card that’s in your wallet that can do contactless.
JN: So do those deals mean you can take on more Valid-type contracts?
Neil Garner: We don’t want to be overly ambitious on this. Valid gives us access to the South American market. They’re fairly well positioned in their own right so we don’t want to stretch ourselves too far.
The one point I want to make around our Cryptomathic deal is the day before we actually announced that deal, there was quite a significant one that happened in the market, which was Mastercard and Visa both endorsing a technology called Host Card Emulation for payments. That is exactly what we’re doing with Cryptomathic.
We suspect also that companies who are dealing with Valid will be able to take advantage of some of these new technologies, to be able to more rapidly deploy mobile wallets that can do contactless – particularly in markets like Brazil, where it's a little bit more of a blank sheet of paper for these kinds of services to evolve.
JN: So, very briefly, what’s up next?
Neil Garner: I think, going into next week, we’re planning to do a show called, “RBTE” which is a retail event in London. Where we’ll be hopefully announcing a few other things, and showing off a few more things, specifically for the retail market and the European market space.