The company has elicited considerable attention in the past few months, having successfully rolled out a “world first” transaction authentication solution, allowing South African bank, Nedbank's, customers to approve Internet banking transactions using their phones to accept or reject the transaction. This effectively eliminates the phishing and pharming attacks that have plagued South African and international banks in recent years.
Ramzi Mansour, Chairman of Entersekt, says: “Entersekt is making great strides into international markets, and the experience and guidance of people that have done this before will prove invaluable. Nathan, Willem and Andreas have achieved incredible successes in the international market, and we are privileged to have them on the team.”
Willem van Biljon graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Computer Science. He led the team building Amazon's hugely successful Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and co-founded Mosaic Software, which built the Postilion payment system - the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems (Windows). The company became one of the top three international payment processing software vendors in the world, and was sold in 2004 to S1 Corp. Van Biljon has held a number of engineering and research positions at LinkData, the Institute for Applied Computer Science, and the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He has since started Nimbula - focused on cloud computing software.
Andreas von Blottnitz represents BV Capital on the boards of Sonos and Appfolio. He is an investor and board member in RightScale and Eucalyptus. He holds the same roles at LogicMonitor (network monitoring) and Lastline (anti-malware provider). Von Blottnitz was the President and CEO of Expertcity, which became a leader in Web-based remote access known as GoToMyPC/GoToMeeting. He developed the company's online marketing model, resulting in over 150 000 customers and in the acquisition by Citrix. As president and CEO of AOL, in Germany, he managed the European service launch and propelled the company to a $150 million corporation within a few years.
Nathan Mintah is the non-executive Chairman of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange Africa Board Advisory Committee. He was a former Partner with Kingdom Zephyr Africa Management Company – a pan-African private equity fund manager. Mintah was previously MD of the retained advisor to the US$400 million HSBC Kingdom Africa investment joint venture. Prior to joining HSBC, Mintah was Head of ABB Project and Trade Finance (Sub-Saharan Africa), with ABB Asea Brown Boveri. His career in investment banking began at Lehman Brothers and with Morgan Stanley & Company, in New York. Mintah holds an MBA from Yale University, School of Management, and a BS in Mathematics from Eckerd College (USA).
Mansour concludes: “We are extremely proud to have attracted such a prestigious board. Our success has allowed us the privilege of their commitment and trust in our technology and vision. We are making significant inroads into the international market and are convinced that Entersekt will continue on this exciting path. We have an amazing team of people and a world-class mobile security solution, in a market which is mobilising at an amazing rate – a confluence of factors to ensure our success.”
