At the Missouri Restaurant Association's Inaugural Ball held in St. Louis earlier this week, FreedomPay introduced its VIBE mobile wallet platform

The new mobile platform accepts mobile payments, sends promotions to mobile phones and provides a customer loyalty, all in a single app.

VIBE features include:

• A cloud-based application that offers merchants direct access to consumers' mobile phones;
• Integration with existing merchant systems, with no new hardware or new steps for employees;
• Centralization of all gateway processing and security solutions with a single provider while simplifying costly PCI DSS compliance;
• VIBE merchants can offer targeted incentives with alerts based on favorites, GPS location, weather, time of day and more; and
• Merchants can launch promotions instantly and track success in real-time, allowing them to end or tweak those that are not successful, and add deals to spur traffic.

"Our entry to St. Louis is receiving strong merchant backing from a broad array of merchants including; quick serve restaurants, table service venues and retail," said Julie Douglas, vice president of Sales.

The app is now live at Chandler Hill Winery and Companion. A spokesperson for VIBE said there is backing within the QSR segment as well, but couldn't disclose names at this point. She added that the platform processes more than $1 billion a year, including through mobile payments.

"We have some very large QSRs coming on board in the near term and we're predicting some stellar numbers for the coming year," the spokesperson added.

According to Forrester, in-store mobile payments and incentives are expected to grow 137 percent annually throughout the next five years.

VIBENOW is available at the Apple Store and the Android Marketplace for download.

Read more about mobile initiatives.