Vodafone UK: m-pay bill
Vodafone UK selected Capgemini to configure and integrate Valista's micro-payment technology, a project shortlisted for Billing Magazine’s “Most Innovative Billing” Global Award..
Clearly they have more to offer than just carriage of IP traffic. They already have billing and CRM relationships with end customers and these can be used to monetize and care for customers’ use of services. They are ideally positioned to understand the context of their customers—aspects such as location, device, and bandwidth. They can also have an end-to-end view of services, providing true understanding and management of the customer experience. Capgemini is actively working to help define these roles, and provide business and technical solutions to support them.
The most fundamental of these roles is the monetization of content and services. Mobile operators have billing infrastructure and corresponding financial relationships with customers, and these can be used as the basis for offering payment services to third parties.
Successful payment services need to do four things:
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Capture the transaction through “e” or “m” point of sale
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Settle the transaction through integration with billing systems
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Process the transaction through integration with billing systems
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Support the transaction by dividing money between parties in the value chain
Vodafone are showing leadership in payments services, identifying new revenue streams to drive growth in ARPU. As part of a global program they are deploying payment solutions, which allow them to drive the market for mobile data services, attractive to their customers as well as content and service providers.
The Solution
Vodafone selected Valista (then iPIN) as a provider of micro-payment technology to allow third party merchants to charge Vodafone’s customers for content and services through their post-pay bill or real-time pre-pay balance. The Valista product suite maps well against the four requirements of payment services. Capgemini won a competitive tender to install, configure and integrate the Valista technology within the Vodafone UK business.
As part of the project Cap Gemini Ernst & Young provided a number of services including:
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Requirements analysis and functional design
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Technical architecture design and build for the secure payment platform
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Integration, configuration, deployment and testing of the solution
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Support for merchant integration
Project challenges included a critical launch window, new merchant relationships, and integration against a number of Vodafone systems including billing, registration, authentication, CRM, and multi-channel Web/ WAP content delivery.
The Benefits
The service was launched in March 2002 for both Internet and mobile payments. Highly significant is this ability to use it for payment of content not delivered over Vodafone’s networks or devices, such as streamed goal clips over fixed-line internet to a home PC. It enables Vodafone’s billing systems to be used for a very different purpose beyond that for which they were designed. Most significantly it allows Vodafone to act as market makers, enabling viable business models for content owners by providing a billing capability for them.
This solution enables Vodafone to:
- Increase ARPU
- Create new revenue streams
- Define new value chains
- Enable multi-channel service delivery
The platform continues to be in use today, providing the core event transaction processing for a range of Vodafone’s premium services in addition to its independent merchant business.
The Vodafone m-pay bill project was shortlisted for Billing Magazine’s “Most Innovative Billing” Global Award in 2002.