Latinia, a software infrastructure company specializing in SMS messaging integration platforms announced its upcoming debut on the Mexican market today. It will be addressing the “spectacular demand of text messaging-related projects at financial institutions to integrate their current business processes with this new channel”. Latinia will have a sales office and equity capital in Mexico city. According to a study conducted last year by Latinia among the country’s main financial institutions, 45% of Mexican banks already have a mobile offer of its financial services.
“Mexico has been a market with undeniable appeal for quite some time. Nevertheless, now is the time that the institutions have decided to firmly commit to SMS as a tool to relate to their customers. They require infrastructure solutions that enable them to make good use of the business logic already in place in the other channels for providing mobile banking services”, stated the company’s top executive in the region, Francesc Perez, director of business development for Latinia middleware products.
This factor, together with the dramatic cellular telephony growth figures in Mexico, the penetration of terminals and the confirmation of the resolution of traditional barriers for consuming them as well as interconnection has made it possible to notably increase the use of short messages in both personal and corporate use. This is particularly concerned with banks as a mechanism for communicating with their customers. In Mexico, more than 80 million short SMS messages are sent daily (three million every hour) and there are 74 million cell phone users with a 64% penetration. For 2010, a market of 90 million mobile lines has been projected. This represents a great potential if we consider that the region’s average is situated at almost 75%. In some European countries, they have already reached 110% as in Spain or Italy where there are more lines than inhabitants.
It should be remembered that Latinia already has some customers in the region such as Banco Santander in Puerto Rico (BSPR). It provides them with the mobile infrastructure to operate their messaging services.
