Our carrier billing deployment tracker provides a quarterly overview of carrier billing launches by the biggest digital media companies across the world. Where have Facebook, Apple, Google, Spotify, Netflix, Riot Games and Amazon been active recently?
Below is the full overview, see if you can spot the two new launches. Click on the image for a bigger version: 
Fortumo recently had the pleasure of presenting at MRC Dublin, Europe’s leading event for payment professionals. We are now glad to share with you the content of that presentation, given together with our good partners over at Badoo.
The audience of digital service providers is bigger than ever before. Smartphone ownership globally exceeds 2.5 billion users. But getting these users to make online payments has become more challenging, because proportionally less people have access to traditional online payments.
In the UK, 74% of people own a smartphone while 61% have a credit card. In India, there are 12x less credit card owners than smartphone users (340M). In Russia, the difference is three-fold and in Brazil two-fold. Unlike the UK, emerging economies are seeing rapid digital user base growth but the majority of new users are unable to pay for digital content.
The situation is further complicated by other factors impacting the digital ecosystem in these countries:
How then to monetize the growing proportion of 2.5 billion smartphone users who not only lack payment access but are also less prone to spend and engage with online content differently from consumers in Western markets?
One way is through alternative payments, more specifically carrier billing. By today, all of the world’s leading digital companies - Apple, Google, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix and Facebook - have begun to resolve the payments challenge by adopting carrier billing and other localized payment methods.
But many other digital service providers remain skeptical about carrier billing, which is caused by myths related to its past:
Another important aspect to consider is customer data. While GDPR focuses on the EU market, companies are being pushed towards adopting it as a global standard. In this context, collecting the information that is necessary for processing card-based payments can become a headache.
With carrier billing, the issue is mitigated as only the user’s phone number is needed to process transactions. Direct carrier billing has also moved towards tokenization in many markets, which means service providers do not even have to worry about processing, storing or potential leaks of customer information.
Working together with telcos also gives additional opportunities for user acquisition and engagement. As telcos have marketing channels in place through which to reach consumers, partnership with them means the opportunity to run co-marketing campaigns.
We at Fortumo are of course slightly skewed towards the payment method that we provide, so it’s also important to understand that carrier billing is not the only option. In digital gaming, here is how the payment mix breaks down globally:
Our co-presenter Badoo recommended merchants not to stick with just the current payment solution (which for most today means credit cards) and not to assume the same approach will work in each country. As an example, they showcased two countries with extremely different user spending behaviour (click for bigger):
Here’s what they recommend when thinking about alternative payment methods:
After deciding which new payment methods to implement, Badoo recommends to test heavily and look at all performance metrics, not just payout:
One topic we at Fortumo often debate with merchants is the risk of cannibalization from adding new payment methods - existing users switching to another method, rather than new users starting to make payments. Data shared by Badoo indicates this concern is often overrated. In countries with low card penetration (countries A and B), alternative payments substantially boost revenue while in mature markets (country C), the effect of cannibalization is minimal, especially with smart segmentation of users (click for bigger):
Want to explore carrier billing as an additional path to revenue? Get in touch.
Hope you’ve cleared your inbox from GDPR notifications and have managed to get back to business by now. So what happened in May, other than the new European data regulation?
Stories on digital content services (especially streaming) caught our eye the most. By chance, we published two research materials during the month on the subscription business model that these merchants so depend on. Make sure to check out our subscription retries case study as well as the white paper on user acquisition, verification and churn. In other news, we also shed some light on Latin America with our 42-page report on carrier billing in the region.
But enough about us. For an overview of May, check out the monthly news summary of the biggest stories from the industry below.
Recently we published a case study explaining how subscription retries help digital merchants increase retention of their users.
However, the topic of getting users to stick around with your service is broader. Users can already drop out during authentication or during the first charge attempt and they may also decide to abandon the service voluntarily. What to do in those cases?
Today we are happy to share with you a new white paper, giving an overview of what both merchants and telcos can do to keep users engaged.
Sounds interesting? Leave your contact details below and find out how carrier billing retention can be improved.
Digital content merchants whose services can also be consumed in emerging markets usually notice that after their content becomes available, traffic to the service is significant but metrics related to sign-ups, conversions and loyalty are far below those of Western countries.
The main cause of this is not adapting to local market specifics and using a global approach to user acquisition, monetization and retention. There is no single “emerging markets strategy” that works for all countries, as the same approach and tactics used in Brazil might completely fail for India. But localisation is the key to success, as recently also highlighted by our good partner iflix.
If you see a large amount of users from emerging markets interested in your service but metrics being worse than in your core markets, consider these 10 ideas to improve your results:
Seeing a lack of growth with your digital content in emerging markets and need additional ideas how to increase your sales? Get in touch.