Morten Hofstad serves as Regional Director Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) at Luup International Ltd. and heads up the rollout of Luup’s innovative, fully integrated mobile payments solutions to banks and financial institutions across the regions. He has more than fifteen years of experience in business development and technology. Morten has spent over ten years focusing his expertise on the electronic finance services arena and has led mobile payment institutions in Europe. His achievements include being the first to take electronic mobile payments to the MENA region.

MENA is predicted to see the fastest growth in mobile payments transactions among emerging markets, and since joining Luup Morten has been instrumental in securing many groundbreaking partnerships with leading financial institutions. The recent Luup partnership with Emirates International Exchange, a leading exchange house in the United Arab Emirates, has seen Luup provide a mobile phone based payroll solution with banking-grade mobile payments management and hosting services. Further partnerships spearheaded by Morten include that with the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), who launched the Luup services under the name of Arrow, and the Metropolitan Bank and Trust Company (MetroBank), one of the largest banks in the Philippines, a country with in excess of two million overseas workers based in the Middle East. Both NBAD and MetroBank are now harnessing cutting edge Luup technology to ensure fast, secure, high availability services for their customers via Luup’s m-payment platform.

Prior to Luup, Morten was Chief Executive Officer of Contopronto, part of the Luup group of companies and founders of the Luup m-payment platform. In 2003 Contopronto became the first company in Europe to receive a full European Union e-money license.

Before joining Contopronto, Morten served as Chief Executive Officer of You Communication AS, one of the largest and most influential mobile operations in Norway, where he was instrumental in working with RIM and TrigCom to facilitate the introduction of Blackberry in Norway in 2005.

In addition Morten is a former Chief Executive Officer of online advertising company Webad AS, part of the NASDAQ-listed Modern Times Group MTG, a leading international entertainment broadcasting group with the largest geographical broadcast footprint in Europe.

Morten is currently based in Dubai, working on several new Luup m-payment projects within the MENA regions.