MAM
Havas Digital’s Mobext launches global mobile messaging platform
MUMBAI: Havas Digital’s mobile marketing agency, Mobext, has launched a proprietary global mobile messaging platform.
The platform, named Simplified Automated Messaging (SAM), will allow companies to launch sophisticated, multi-country mobile messaging campaigns.
The platform offers features like the ability to send personalised, highly-targeted SMS to an opt-in mobile database and execute 2-way SMS marketing campaigns with provisions for polling, voting, trivia, contests, data profiling, couponing and on-pack promotions.
The platform is managed and hosted from Philippines where it is already live along with India and Argentina. It is slated to be launched in all other Mobext markets worldwide, namely: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, UK, Poland, Portugal, Spain, France, U.S., Indonesia, China, Singapore, and Canada before end 2012.
In Asia, the platform will be launched before the end of the year.
Havas Digital EVP – global director of product development Rob Griffin, “With the exponential growth in mobile and mobile‘s growing importance in creating meaningful brands, Havas Digital is proud to be rolling out Mobext‘s ‘SAM’ for our clients. Mobile messaging is often overlooked due to mobile rich media, smartphones, and tablets but we feel it is a critically efficient element when optimizing a consumer‘s experience with a brand by supporting and enhancing CRM, social media, and promotional activities.”
Mobext APAC head and Mobext Philippines CEO Arthur Policarpio said, “The problem with most SMS marketing platforms is the high-degree of complexity as well as lack of global scale – it is an extremely complicated process to secure short codes as well as SMS push pipelines on a per country basis. SAM simplifies all this. SAM enables enterprises of all sizes to quickly launch a multi-country, mobile messaging campaign – all from a simplified, easy-to-use web-based platform.”
MUMBAI: In India’s fast-moving payments race, Visa has just swiped in a new leader. The company has named Suresh Sethi as its India country head, marking a key leadership shift as it sharpens its focus on digital payments growth in the market. Sethi steps into the role following his recent exit from Protean eGov Technologies, where he served as chief executive officer. He succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who has moved on after more than four years at Visa to pursue an external opportunity.
The appointment comes at a time when Visa is doubling down on its expansion strategy across India and the wider region, deepening partnerships and accelerating adoption in an increasingly competitive digital payments ecosystem.
Sethi brings with him a broad, cross-market perspective shaped by decades of experience across corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money and large-scale government technology initiatives. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America and the United States, focusing on transaction banking services within the corporate bank.
His appointment signals a blend of institutional experience and market familiarity qualities that could prove critical as Visa navigates a landscape where fintech innovation, regulatory evolution and consumer adoption are all accelerating at once.
As digital payments in India continue to scale rapidly, the leadership change underscores a simple reality, in a market where every tap, scan and swipe counts, who leads the charge can matter just as much as the technology itself.
