YellowPepper, a Miami-based mobile payment and mobile banking company focused on the Latin America market, on Monday said payments industry pioneer Mohammad Khan has been named chairman of the board of YellowPepper.
Khan is former president and founder of ViVOtech, a pioneering NFC software and hardware company that paved the way for mobile payments.
“We have recently launched our mobile payment solution in Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, and his extensive expertise within payments and commerce will be invaluable to further increase the success of those implementations,” said Alexander Sjögren, CTO of YellowPepper, which now has 74 employees in the region. “NFC is currently getting established as the standard for mobile payments with Visa, MasterCard, Apple Pay and Android Pay all adopting some version of it. Having Mohammed onboard, who is considered to be the forefather of NFC’s role in payments, will give us a unique expertise in the area.”
In his 12 years at ViVOtech, Khan led the deployment of NFC readers and field-testing a number of mobile payment trials globally. His efforts in driving mobile payments successfully set the stage for widely accepted NFC mobile payments such as Apple Pay and Android Pay. Prior to founding ViVOtech in 2001, Khan held leadership positions at Verifone, which he joined in 1983. Khan helped the company develop its point-of-sale systems and later helped market them in 96 countries. Khan was also a co-founder of the Internet Commerce business for Verifone.
“In Latin America, YellowPepper has done an excellent job over the last 10 years to establish an infrastructure, widening financial services like mobile banking to 5 million users and that number is growing, and now they are working hard in mobile payments,” said Khan on Monday. “I see this effort as very important for the payment industry as well as consumers and I want to see how I can help in the coming years.”
In June, YellowPepper partnered with Carta Worldwide to bring Host Card Emulation (HCE) NFC mobile payments to Latin America. Carta Worldwide will provide its HCE technology to YellowPepper that will, in turn, leverage its regional footprint with more than 50 financial institutions and retailers to introduce the new technology to them and future clients.