Last month the three largest UK mobile operators announced they are joining forces to create a mobile wallet solution to support real world contactless transactions and mobile payments. Joining the ranks of AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA’s joint venture Isis, this latest collaboration by Everything Everywhere, O2 UK and Vodafone UK is a sign of the strategic importance of M-Commerce to the mobile industry and represents a significant step towards putting mobile operators firmly at the centre of the M-Commerce ecosystem.
However, while this is a positive move for the industry, how prepared are mobile operators to navigate the complex M-Commerce landscape?
This landscape has evolved rapidly over the last year, with both established players and new entrants taking up positions in the value chain.
In particular, Direct to Mobile billing is a growing trend for buying content both on dedicated sites such as app stores, as well as from within applications, and as smartphones continue to rise in popularity, mobile users want an easy click to pay purchase experience just like they have on the web. Developers can create apps to run across multiple platforms, enabled for one-click payments directly to the end user’s phone bill. The ease of this payment also encourages the opportunity for up-sell from within the application. Operators can provide customers with greater purchasing flexibility and reliability compared with traditional methods such as Premium SMS. This click to pay experience is seamless and secure for the consumer.
In the Direct-to-Mobile billing arena, traditional aggregators and emergent Cloud Service Providers are being joined by “pure-play” payment service providers, each offering a variant of direct-to-mobile billing services to merchants such as content providers, app stores, social networking sites and even sellers of real-world services such as transport tickets and toll operators.
These players are also forming partnerships with each other: for example several of the pure-play payment service providers are working with established aggregators as a quick way of connecting to mobile operators in many of the countries in which they operate.
This multi-faceted M-Commerce landscape presents operators with both opportunities and challenges: on one hand, they can realize new transaction-based revenues from multiple sources – directly from merchants, from aggregators and cloud service providers, and from pure-play payment service providers. On the other hand, they need to be able to control and manage these transactions, to automatically settle with multiple parties in the value chain, to make it easy for those partners to connect to their billing platform, and to protect their customers from unauthorized or fraudulent transactions.
Aepona’s USP Payments and Settlement solution allows operators to effectively manage this complexity, providing a centralized “command centre” for Direct-to-Bill transactions that originate from multiple sources, with advanced functionality to allow scalability to many partners, prevent revenue leakage, and protect the consumer. Aepona can offer its USP Payments and Settlement solution to operators either as an on-premise software platform, or as a hosted, fully managed service. In addition, we have partnered with Bango, the leading global provider of billing and analytics services for mobile content and application providers, to help quickly bring established merchant relationships to our operator customers.
Watch our recent webinar ("Putting Operators at the Centre of M-Commerce") in which we discussed the M-Commerce opportunity for operators, focusing on the opportunities, challenges and solutions associated with Direct-to-Mobile billing, and the issues that operators need to consider in order to play a central role in this exciting marketplace.
