Ami Shafrir is an innovative businessman with a track record of creating innovation and predicting the future of technology advancement. He realized this when he was ten years old when he was building electronic gadgets. At 15 years old, he was already manufacturing his mass-produced electronic devices. He served in the Israeli military for four years and specialized in telecommunications. In his mid-20s, he was a master of cellular communications and predicted where the world would go wireless.
In 1996, he envisioned the whole world going on the Internet, including all financial transactions and institutes. He also predicted that his newly created payment platform would be the new internet currency. All of his predictions are proven realists in today’s world of cellular devices ruling everything individuals do and electronics ruling any possible section of livelihood.
As a prominent internet entrepreneur, he started his own company, WorldSite networks Inc. in 1994. From 1994 – 2004, he owned a 50,000 ft.² building at 8670 Wilshire Boulevard. In the 90s, this building was the first in the area to have a high-speed Internet connection. His firm, WorldSite networks Inc., mainly provided Internet hosting, payment processing and website programming. It also had a subsidiary called ComBill. comBill especially processed payments on the Internet. It was also known as a circle of Internet operators at the time as the first one in the history of the Internet to process real-time credit card transactions. Ami was working with banks and the city of Los Angeles with his company, providing them with online payment systems.
ComBill has become renowned for its network division providing billing services for companies on the Internet and Online financial transaction services, namely, providing credit and debit information and collection services. It also offers payment fraud detection services and electronic funds transfer via computer networks for global computer information and online customers.
Conclusion
Ami Shafrir‘s vision for the Internet billing platform ComBill was ahead of its time. He was pitching banks while explaining to them that Internet banking and billing are the future, and there will be fewer physical bank branches and bank tellers. Although most laughed at Ami’s prediction, it is the current reality of e-commerce and banking on the Internet. The billing internet industry is currently multi-trillion dollars worth. He predicted Internet currencies such as bitcoin and blockchain tokens more than ten years before bitcoin was invented.
