News Archive 2005

01.11.2005
Valimo Opens Swedish Office and Joins WPKI Association

Helsinki November 1, 2005 Valimo today announced the opening of a Swedish office, to be headed by Johan Tullberg who recently joined the company. The Swedish office will offer Valimo´s Swedish customers improved service, and will in particular be used as a platform to contribute to the WPKI Non-Profit Association project, which is operated by the Swedish BankID forum.

"We are pleased to announce our presence in Sweden, and given the Swedish advanced IT and telecommunications networks and savvy consumers and enterprises, we believe that it will join Finland as a showcase of the strong authentication and digital signing capabilities of the mobile phone," stated Valimo CEO Will Cardwell. "Our business is growing rapidly, and we are eager to show more excellent use cases in our home Nordic markets. Johan Tullberg's remarkable experience from the mobile operator's side provides Valimo with a new set of skills that clearly will enhance our offerings to Swedish customers."

Before Valimo, Mr. Tullberg was Commercial Product Manager at Vodafone Sweden with strategic and operational responsibility for the development of payments and secure transaction solutions for the mobile market. In addition, he was Vodafone Sweden's representative during the start up of the WPKI Non-Profit Association. "I have followed Valimo's business for a number of years from the operator perspective and I am excited to join the company and its dynamic environment. The market is ready for services based upon strong authentication, but it's not a just question of how to solve it: it's also a question of when to launch the services and which ones to launch," says Johan Tullberg.

The market for mobile identity management and strong authentication solutions is in a fast growing phase, led by the Nordic countries where initiatives led by governments and financial institutions are creating new service opportunities for the mobile operators. In addition to eGovernment projects, bank-driven initiatives like Sweden's WPKI Non-Profit Association and Mobey Forum, show that the financial sector is moving towards user-friendly mobile phone-based banking transaction validation.

"Due to the high penetration rates of mobile phones and the immobility of traditional online authentication solutions, we believe that mobile network operators are the only parties capable of offering any person at any time the chance to sign documents and confirm transactions," says Cardwell. "The speed with which the market for WPKI-based mobile identity services is picking up in 2005 has surprised even us. Our number of implementations has more than doubled over 2004, and it seems that most operators in Europe, Middle the East and Asia are in late stages of making their platform decisions. While Scandinavia is leading the way for the time being, the rest of the world is moving quickly, with countries like Kuwait introducing very interesting new services based on WPKI. In this context, we believe that Sweden's WPKI.net initiative will be one of the benchmarks for next generation financial services for the mobile consumer and enterprise."

About Valimo

Helsinki-based Valimo Wireless delivers identity management and strong authentication software solutions in both mobile and fixed-line environments to its operators and corporate customers. Valimo's solutions are used by more than 40 European and Middle Eastern customers, assuring non-repudiation, high data security and high availability over most network infrastructures and end-user devices. Valimo is growing at a roughly 50 percent annual rate, has a AAA rating from Dun and Bradstreet, and has offices in Finland, Sweden, Germany and Spain. For more information, please see our website at www.valimo.com.

Further information:

Valimo Wireless
www.valimo.com
Will Cardwell, CEO
Tel: +358 9 4385 0082
will.cardwell@valimo.com

Johan Tullberg
Tel: +46 733 343 545
johan.tullberg@valimo.com