We’re on the final stretch to close out the year, which also means publishing our last news summary of the digital ecosystem this year. The stories that caught our eye in November are below, but make sure to also check out our new market report on the Nordics and the planning checklist for launching carrier billing.

General

• SCMP: China’s record Singles’ Day offers glimpse of future shopping trends

• Time: Best Inventions 2019 - KaiOS

• Disruptive Asia: SoftBank to merge Yahoo Japan with Line creating $30bn giant

Payments

• TechCrunch: Facebook wants you to pay people with Facebook Pay

• The Paypers: Direct Carrier Billing: Trends, Updates, and Opportunities

• PC Mag: Mastercard Bans Automatic Billing After Free Trials

Digital publishing

• Digiday: How news publishers are chasing international subscriber growth

• What’s New In Publishing: Publishers still rely on traditional revenue streams, research shows

• What’s New In Publishing: What Facebook Pay could mean for the future of content payments

E-commerce & transportation

• Finextra: Grab expands to Japan and the Middle East

• TechCrunch: Lyft is ceasing scooter operations in six cities and laying off 20 employees

• Business Of Fashion: E-Commerce Platform Tokopedia Reportedly Set to Raise up to $1.5 Billion

OTT

• TechCrunch: Disney officially launches its streaming ‘crown jewel,’ Disney+

• Advanced Television: Telia’s $957m acquisition of Bonnier approved

• Music Business Worldwide: TikTok owner could launch Spotify rival next month

Gaming

• Newzoo: Games Market Trends and Publishers to Watch in Southeast Asia

• The Verge: Microsoft’s xCloud preview now has 50 new games, more than Stadia’s launch list

• Bloomberg: Counter-Strike World Champions Aim for First Esport Team IPO

This market report takes a look at the carrier billing landscape in the Nordic region: Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway.

While access to traditional payment methods (card-based payments) in the region is high, data shows consumers often prefer to pay for online purchases with carrier billing. According to SuperData Research, the market share of carrier billing in the Nordic countries for digital gaming ranges from 10% to 21%.

Unlike credit cards, carrier billing does not require the user to share any personal (financial) data to complete transactions. This the primary reason for the popularity of carrier billing in the Nordics.

Due to less data being gathered, checkout flows for carrier billing are much shorter, leading to increased conversion for merchants; this also means consumers do not need to worry about their data getting leaked or used for fraudulent purposes.

In the report below, we have profiled the digital ecosystem and demographics of each of the Nordic countries. We have additionally included internal data from Fortumo, sharing information on what carrier billing solutions look like in the country, as well as data on user spending behavior.

• Demographics: population of the country, median age, localization suggestions
• Economy: GNI per capita, bank account access, debit and credit card ownership, taxation, currency exchange rate
• Telecommunications: mobile phone and smartphone ownership, mobile broadband access, prepaid SIM market share, telco market shares, GSMA Mobile Connectivity Index Score, platforms used to access digital content
• Marketing: Google Play cost-per-install (CPI) as compared to the US market
• Merchant deployments: list of leading digital merchants partnered with telcos in the country for carrier billing or bundling
• Carrier billing data: monthly median revenue per user, transaction volume change, carrier billing popularity for digital content purchases, price point distribution, user spend distribution

Leave your contact details below and you’ll get access to the Nordics market report immediately.

Most digital service providers launching carrier billing with Fortumo have never used the payment method before. Carrier billing operates with a different setup compared to credit card payments. This means the launch process can include unexpected topics for service providers.

So that service providers would know what's involved in launching carrier billing in advance, we have put together a launch guide for our Hosted DCB product.

This guide gives an overview of what decisions and actions need to be taken in order successfully launch carrier billing in the shortest time possible.

Enter your contact details below and you'll be able to immediately download the checklist.

This case study looks at how the leading marketplaces and trading platforms provider OLX Group launched direct carrier billing with Fortumo for its online classifieds portal in Poland.

Carrier billing allows consumers in Poland to pay for OLX services including highlighted ads and personalized pages by charging payments to their phone bill.

Using Fortumo’s Hosted DCB solution means minimal need to invest time into development for OLX, an increase in the number of users paying for its services and capability to roll out carrier billing internationally.

Enter your contact details below to find out how OLX is using carrier billing for revenue growth.

The subscription economy is growing. People want to pay and consume on demand instead of buying and owning physical goods and digital content. Digital service providers who want to meet these needs face an unpleasant challenge.

Credit card subscription payments don’t work out of the box. The card payments infrastructure has been built for one-off transactions and payment service providers do not provide recurring payment functionalities.

This means companies using a subscription business model either need to build the solution themselves or purchase it from vendors like Stripe, Recurly or Zuora. This can get costly: Stripe for example charges an extra 0.4% to 0.7% for subscription payments.

Things work a bit differently with carrier billing. Functionalities to support subscription payments are already included without extra fees. While merchants need to rely on paid solutions to process subscriptions with credit cards, it’s part of the package with Fortumo.

For this purpose, we have built our Subscription Engine on top of our direct carrier billing platform. Here’s what the Subscription Engine helps merchants with:

• User management: manages user subscriptions on behalf of merchants; renewing user subscriptions at the correct time and frequencies and terminating or cancelling subscriptions when necessary

• Payment retries: failed payment retries in cases where recurring charges fail (also due to technical, but mostly for commercial reasons - spend limits or low prepaid SIM account balances); our recent case study shows a 14% revenue increase from retries

• User notifications: “invoicing” for carrier billing subscriptions is done through SMS notifications for initiation, renewals, failures and unsubscriptions; postpaid customers also receive the invoice as part of their monthly phone bill

• Promotions: built-in support for various marketing activities, including free trial offers, promotional pricing, discounts to loyal customers and counter-offers during cancellation

• Analytics: API-based real-time reporting for both operational (payment events to give or revoke user access) and accounting/analytics purposes (transactional data itself)

• Refunding: automated refunding of users (either recrediting their prepaid balance or removing the charge from their monthly phone bill) through the Refund API

• Localization and currencies: this should go without saying but in all countries where Fortumo operates, consumer-facing checkout flows and communication is localized and consumers can make payments in their local currency

As the popularity of the subscription economy grows, so too will the amount of users who want to make payments but either don’t have a credit card, abandon their cart due to the lengthy checkout process or refuse to share their personal data online.

For these consumers, carrier billing provides merchants with a globally available payment method to continue growing their revenue. If you’re thinking of taking this direction and want to take advantage of our Subscription Engine while doing so, get in touch.