Connectivity
A carrier agreement, provisioning, taxation, porting and a support desk. Sold by telecom vendors who have never issued a card.
Connectivity and payments are normally two vendors, two customer records and a permanent reconciliation problem. Unified Signal runs both on one convergent billing platform — one customer record, one integration, one partner accountable for the whole service.
Austin, TexasWireless since 1998Fintech since 2010
Usage, purchases, transfers and subscriptions all rate against the same account and settle on the same invoice.
Figures reported by Unified Signal.
01 / The problem
A brand that wants to sell connectivity and money together is buying from two industries that do not talk to each other — and then paying, indefinitely, for the gap between them.
A carrier agreement, provisioning, taxation, porting and a support desk. Sold by telecom vendors who have never issued a card.
A card issuer, a sponsor bank, KYC, ledgering and payment rails. Sold by fintech vendors who have never rated a minute of voice.
Two customer records that disagree. Two invoices. Two sets of credentials. Reconciliation becomes a permanent internal job.
When a top-up fails at 11pm, each vendor can credibly say the fault sits with the other one. You own the outage either way.
02 / The platform
The convergent core does the rating, the ledgering, the identity and the reporting. Everything else — a SIM, a debit card, a telehealth visit, a music subscription — is a service line that settles against it.
Layer 1
Shared by every service line. This is the part competitors in either industry normally supply only half of.
Layer 2
A branded banking alternative: hold value, spend it, move it, and earn on it — without your customer needing a traditional bank account.
Layer 3
The services people already pay for every month, sold under your name and rated on the same account as their money.
Because these rate on the same core, a customer can pay for their phone plan out of their wallet balance, or earn marketplace rewards that offset it — without a settlement file moving between two vendors.
03 / How money moves
Every inbound and outbound rail below terminates at the same ledger. You integrate once against the core; adding a rail is a configuration change, not another vendor contract.
Figure 1 — Inbound rails, the shared core, and outbound rails. Rail availability varies by programme, jurisdiction and sponsor bank; the set enabled for your brand is agreed during scoping.
04 / The three-balance model
Most prepaid programmes expose the whole account to the card. Unified Signal splits an account into three balances and moves value between them under the customer's control — the company calls it a financial firewall.
The working balance. Money loads here from a bank account, a card, an employer, a transfer or a cash deposit at retail, and is held as stored value against the customer's record.
Card spend draws on this balance and no other. The customer moves value onto it deliberately — a weekly grocery budget, one purchase, a travel allowance — and everything else stays behind.
Value set aside inside the same account. It is not spendable until the customer moves it back into the wallet, which makes it useful for goal saving, round-ups and holding a float.
05 / Wireless
Carrier access on US networks, plus everything behind the SIM: rating, billing, taxation, porting, support tooling and dealer management. Unified Signal has been building this side of the platform since 1998.
Because wireless rates on the same core as the wallet, a customer can pay their phone bill from wallet balance, or have marketplace rewards applied against it, with no settlement file moving between systems.
06 / What a launch looks like
This is Unified Signal's standard plan for a full systems launch that includes a private-label debit card. Bank and card-network approval is the long pole and starts on day one; your team's real work is branding and the beta.
Bank and debit card approval Weeks 1 to 8
Equipment installation and configuration Week 1
Software setup and configuration Week 1
Branding requirements and upload Weeks 1 to 2
Debit card set-up and testing Weeks 2 to 3
Debit card creation Weeks 3 to 5
System testing on staging Weeks 5 to 6
Production upload and testing Weeks 6 to 7
Employee beta launch Weeks 7 to 9
Modifications from the feedback loop Week 10
Full-scale consumer production launch Weeks 11 to 12
Week numbers count from contract signature. Indicative; scope and bank approval timing vary.
Figure 3 — Standard 12-week implementation plan for a complete systems launch with a private-label debit card. Source: Unified Signal product overview, slide 38.
07 / Ways to engage
The same platform underneath all three. What changes is how much of it is yours to configure, and how quickly you can be selling.
Launch on one of Unified Signal's own pre-built brands — MyTime, Genesis or AllFi — with your identity applied on top. The systems already exist and are already approved.
Your own programme on the shared platform. You choose which service lines to switch on, the branding is yours end to end, and Unified Signal operates the systems.
A licensed instance of the platform for organisations that need isolation, their own configuration surface, or a deployment that fits an existing enterprise estate.
Timings are Unified Signal's standard estimates and depend on scope, bank approval and how much branding work you bring. Strategy and go-to-market consulting is available alongside any of the three.
08 / Who this is for
Unified Signal does not sell to consumers and does not compete with its clients. The platform is built for organisations that already have an audience and want to serve it directly instead of referring it somewhere else.
Retailers, media and sports properties, faith and affinity organisations, associations and direct-sales networks. You have the relationship and the trust; what you lack is the licensing, the rails and the billing system underneath a branded service.
Employers, staffing firms, gig platforms and marketplaces. Payroll, early wage access and instant payout become part of your product instead of a bank transfer you have no visibility into.
MVNOs, dealers, distributors and resellers with subscribers today. Add money movement to an existing wireless base — or add connectivity to an existing payments base — without running a second stack.
The end customers these brands reach are often poorly served by traditional banking. 4.2% of US households were unbanked in 2023 — about 5.6 million households — and a further 14.2% were underbanked, meaning they held an account but still used non-bank services such as cheque cashing or money orders. FDIC, 2023 National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households, published November 2024. fdic.gov/household-survey
09 / The honest comparison
All three are legitimate. Which one is right depends on whether the platform is the business you want to be in, or the thing standing between you and the business you want to be in.
Carrier agreements, a sponsor bank, a card processor, a billing system and the compliance function to hold it together.
An MVNO enabler for connectivity, a banking-as-a-service provider for money, and your team in the middle.
One convergent platform for both, operated by Unified Signal, presented entirely as your brand.
10 / Next step
A first conversation is a scoping call: which service lines, which markets, which engagement model, and what the bank approval path looks like for your programme.