Shares of Pareteum Corp (NYSEAMERICAN:TEUM), a 16-year-old provider of Telecom software and systems more than doubled in trading today after being briefly halted. This was after a press release which stated that the company had completed development enabling it to add the support of Blockchain technology to its billing and settlement services.Pareteum is just part of the blockchain-Bitcoin fever. With the cryptocurrency vaulting along with anything having a faint association to either the technology or the currency.Shares of Pareteum had been down 58% this year through Friday’s close (22nd December). Today the shares have vaulted $1.33 to $2.6, more than doubling the price.Readers can view the above share price action below: TEUM Daily ChartA Brief into PareteumPareteum Cop was founded by Robert Turner in 2001 and is headquartered in New York.Pareteum Corporation is a leading global provider of mobile networking software and services. Its mission is to provide a single solution to the problem of fully enabling and securing the mobile cloud.As a software service provider, Pareteum acts as a communication service provider. It provides communication services to businesses of all sizes. Furthermore, it provides Internet of Things (IoT) and M2M (machine to machine).The company enables people to connect to their employees and customers. The use of their services enables and individual to reduce total cost of ownership by 15-50% and improve time to market by 30-120 days.Pareteum also improves future customer needs by continually upgrading software via TEUM market based services, application programme interfaces (APIs) and cloud infrastructure across a wide array of providers and services.Pareteum allows customers to achieve business growth and efficient scaling of new brands and services created thus generating new revenues. The company efficiently reduced operating complexities and expenses and seamlessly and cost effectively improved operations management.The Blockchain MarketAt the moment, investors buy funds from their asset managers, advisors or broker through the internet. Orders are executed individually involving significant communication in the process.However, with blockchain powered ‘order routing’ enables orders to be executed at the same time. Based on one estimate, cost saving for Luxembourg domiciled funds could be somewhere in the ball-park of €1 billion annually.Moody’s analyst, Tiziano Oliver, views this as ‘credit positive’ though he sees this as suitable for larger players who are likely to reap maximum benefits.Large asset managers are better positioned to capture the benefits of blockchain platforms because the technology requires operational support and dedicated resources. To process hundreds of orders in relatively short periods of time means the technology should also be scalable. Well-developed modern IT infrastructure is required to cope with large amounts of information to be processed.As adopting blockchain takes time, firms will have to run parallel systems during a transitional phase before switching over fully to the new technology. While firms test blockchain, they will need to consider the developing regulatory framework. While regulators have shown an interest in blockchain, the regulatory framework is still nascent and generally fragmented across jurisdictions.Recent DevelopmentsPareteum is a rapidly growing mobile cloud communications platform company. The company has completed development enabling it to add the support of blockchain technology to its billing and settlement services. This new service capability enables Pareteum customers to participate in the transformational ‘digital economy monetization to the cloud’ and now accept and process Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, air tokens and other forms of cryptocurrencies.Over $287 million of cryptocurrency transactions (7.8% of ICOs) involved payments in 2017. The evolution begun in 2016 within the mobile payment industry with more than 50% of mobile users making a mobile payment and it has continued in 2017 to $60 billion.The biggest disruptor could be the technology behind digital currency. Blockchain has been noted as the potential foundation for building a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust and transparency while streaming business processes which is critical to advancing adoptions of mobile payments among consumers and businesses.The new feature being offered to all Pareteums’ global mobility cloud customers will allow them to not only accept the cryptocurrencies but also to perform payments, processing and settlements with their partners in any currency.As success story of market penetration is Pareteum announcing a partnership with Airfox to integrate their advertising subsidy platform into the application exchange and developers’ platform exchange based on the requirements for advertising to subsidize the costs of growing data services usage. Since then, subsidies have gone beyond advertising and into micro-loans and cryptocurrency as the mobile phone penetrates more of daily life.Vic Bozzo, who is the CEO of Pareteum, stated that demand in the mobile market for digital wallet applications had quickly morphed into a requirement to process and settle all forms of currency and an entire ecosystem of applications relying purely on digital settlement has emerged.It is a natural requirement of any mobile platform provider to support this move as many mobile applications become reliant on mainstream digital currency and other applications begin to create their own.Hal Turner, Executive Chairman of Pareteum, is of the view that solutions that take us through our cloud services into small cities and cryptocurrency payment capabilities have been sold. His considered view is that we can live in an entire digital universe where all out transactions may be managed through our own personal mobile phone with secure identity management and digital payments.In a scenario where a mobile phone is your bank, without brick and mortar, it is possible that throughout the day you may have earned enough digital currency through your transactions to be rewarded with that coffee or snack, phone minute or that extra megabyte of data.The executive officer envisions that Pareteum could create its own currency payments and settlements among millions of subscribers on its platform globally. The outlook for 2018 is good if in retrospect we consider Pareteum’s opening of doors to Internet of Things (IoT), small cities and use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, creating predicative analytics for vast amounts of digital data which can be securely processed.FinancialsThe company, originally founded in 2001 as elephant stock communications, has gone through a series of transformations. Its main business has been to serve various kinds of communication technologies to the telecom industry including technology to help ‘mobile virtual network operators’ (MVNOs).Pareteum got 88% of its revenues in 2016 from just two operators, Vodafone and Zain, a mobile operator serving Middle East and Africa, according 10-k for that year. The report describes a recent pivot to emphasize cloud computing for MVNOs.The company recorded a downward trend in sales, dropping from 59% last year to $12.9 million and expected to be about the same level this year. They lost $4.6 per share last year and that is expected to improve to a net loss of $.63 this year.ConclusionTEUM has now ventured into the blockchain technology. There is a lot of value addition they are expected to accrue from this as depicted by their share price. As such, we are quite bullish about the company.We will be updating our subscribers as soon as we know more. For the latest updates on TEUM, sign up below!Disclosure: We have no position in TEUM and have not been compensated for this article.
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