Mobile payments company Fortumo has launched a new hosted direct carrier billing (HDCB) product that provides merchants with a turnkey solution to display and authorize transactions from their users.
HDCB is a payment product hosted by Fortumo that it says allows any digital content merchant to use the most advanced features of direct carrier billing, including dynamic pricing, 2-step and token based charging as well as recurring payments capabilities.
In the back-end, HDCB is directly connected with clean APIs provided by mobile operators. As a result, merchants can launch direct carrier billing for their customers without needing to negotiate a launch with every carrier separately, develop and maintain checkout flows or manage end-user support.
Fortumo also protects merchants from payments fraud through a built-in set of security features and monitoring by a dedicated risk management team.
“Direct carrier billing today competes with card-based payments in segments like gaming, streaming and mobile commerce. This means the commercial and technical level of mobile payments needs to be bank-grade in order for merchants to adopt it,” said Martin Koppel, co-founder and CEO of Fortumo. “Companies like Google and Spotify have pushed carriers to innovate, but so far the advanced features have been available only to a small segment of digital businesses.”
Koppel said that HDCB essentially makes direct carrier billing in its purest form available to any digital content provider regardless of size.”
According to the research company Ovum, carrier billing has the potential to generate $142 billion [PDF] in revenue to mobile operators by 2020. Koppel maintains that an agnostic approach to merchants who can use direct carrier billing will accelerate the growth of the sector seen today.
“We see carriers wanting to launch leading digital merchants on their network, but at the same time there are many regional and local companies who wish to do the same,” he said. “Enabling the long tail revenue for carriers through our payment products ensures a growth in revenue from payment processing.”
Be the first to comment