Fifteen years ago, Mobile Sense had a vision of a universal mobile payment solution and, undeterred by the failure of the industry’s early forays into that market, set out to make it happen.

It is estimated that the mobile payments market will be worth almost $3,000 billion annually by 2016, and dozens of vendors are rushing to market with piecemeal solutions that will only play into the hands of fraudsters, creating a fragmented market and disillusioned consumers as a by-product of their haste.

Meanwhile, Mobile Sense has quietly realised its vision, investing more than $10m and 100 man years in developing MS Pioneer – the world’s first true, universal mobile payments platform. Tried and tested over five years to ensure that it complies with both consumer behaviours and the stringent demands of the banking industry, MS Pioneer is ready to deploy.

MS Pioneer is designed to be as universal as the networks it runs on, however, Mobile Sense is agnostic about how that technology is delivered to market. You can choose to deploy the entire architecture as a branded solution for the mobile money needs of your customers. Or you can take advantage of selected parts of our platform to mitigate the risks of taking pre-existing mobile payments systems to full market readiness. Either way, we’re more than happy to listen.

So what does the future hold? In its current form, we see MS Pioneer as being at the forefront of the socialisation of money, where we start to understand not merely the transactional cost of money, but the human value behind it – opening up new channels to market, new opportunities for entrepreneurship and new forms of philanthropy in the process.

And we are merely at the start of the journey. Mobile payment systems will evolve into the Personal Data Vaults of the future: individuals will manage their own data, authenticating themselves to the third parties with whom they want to transact via the Vault and disclosing as much – or as little – of their personal data as they wish. Will this happen? Well, Mobile Sense has always believed that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.