The m-commerce space is revolutionized these days. Placing the bills of purchases made digitally on your mobile bill is gradually becoming a hotly contested space. The market is flooded with mobile applications of almost every category but probably the biggest hurdle for the app developers now-a-days is how to get paid for in-app contents. Particularly, they face two major challenges- making purchasing through mobile simple enough so that the users buy their app and in-app content and enabling the users to make payments in markets while many of them don’t have a credit or debit card. Carrier billing, also referred to as operator billing is expanding its limits and is demanding integration with the network of the mobile service providers to answer the same problem.
How carrier billing enables mobile payments?
Carrier billing is a five step process:
- The developer integrates with the service provider
- The user purchases goods
- The mobile payment application processes the payment
- The service provider confirms transaction and user receives goods
- The developer gets paid
Choice for the consumers: Telco versus OTT
Mobile service providers face tough competition from the over-the-top (OTT) players in the market. The direct carrier billers are looking forward to become a payment method by letting users pay for goods digitally in both the online and the offline spaces. Thus, carrier billing arrives as an out of the box solution capable enough of setting aside OTT billing and enabling the service providers to monetize over-the-top offerings backed by a collaborative approach with third party OTT contents providers. It is a platform possessing support from pre-built APIs that lead to faster integration on various digital service vendors. It enables revenue source recognition in the rich ecosystem of digital service providers from the very first day. This also in turn affects the revenue in a significant positive way.
How telcos can compete with OTT players?
Carrier billing offers certain significant benefits that can be enjoyed by the mobile service providers to deal with the tough competition given by the over-the-top platforms. Carrier billing helps mobile service providers in:
Enabling a source of Digital Revenue
The biggest challenge faced by the mobile service operators is the deployment of a common platform for the management as well as billing of all available digital services. The Carrier Billing solution provides a single billing interface for all service purposes such as OTT, VAS among others. Thus, the mobile-based payments made against the availing of digital contents at an app store can be attached to the subscriber’s bill. This allows service providers to act as a digital service distributor. This also helps in collecting additional revenue through service sales and partnership.
Obtaining a market edge
Carrier billing provides a competitive edge in the rapidly changing business scenario. Thus, telecom operators can gain great benefits from the solution as the carrier billing solution offers them multiple features such as subscription management, event-based charging, and access control management among others.
Summary
Carrier Billing adds to the benefits enjoyed by the service providers as well as the consumers. Also, it extends support for various authentication mechanisms in order to increase customer satisfaction, ensure customer satisfaction and minimize mistakes in purchases. Thus, it ensures a better health of the consumer-operator relationship and balances the new-age payment ecosystem.
