Beware: new billing kids on the block

With another Telemedia360 event under our belts, many of you who were there will have got a great insight into where the business is going. There are many new kids on the block and the world of content interaction and billing has changed. There is still plenty of room for IVR and pSMS billing services, but as media companies evolve what they are doing with mobile – particularly with tablets – then these old ways of doing things face growing threats from other payment tools.

Print media companies love tablets as a tablet app suddenly gives them something they can legitimately charge for to make up for all that free stuff that is on the web. With this comes the huge opportunity for billing for these services. But, while pSMS and WAP billing play a role in getting money into the system, most consumers these days don’t trust operator billing (a recent Kony survey finds that only 25% of people do) because operators are not known for getting their ‘normal’ bills right, let alone handling any other billing on top.

So what’s happening? Well services where cards are registered at leisure on line then used as part of a one click on mobile, tablet, or in-app are pretty popular in the UK, but these models don’t scale in Europe and further afield where cards are not so well used. Here pSMS and traditional billing tools do have a role to play, but they are then not used as the front line payment brand. That is handled by the new breed of payment companies.

In the retail and m-commerce space, things are tougher still for telemedia billing. There is a huge opportunity for mobile as a payment tool for both in-store and m-retail purchases, but that opportunity is slipping away from operators and telemedia companies on a daily basis. Orange and Barclaycard have rolled out a trial for NFC based mobile micropayments in store, but frankly who needs the hassle of an NFC enabled phone, chipped with bank chip and limited only to stores that can afford the redemption equipment and POS integration?

Like media companies, though, retailers are even more reluctant to use operating based billing as the operators want too big a cut of the transaction to make it viable, they don’t see them as reliable enough and operators still slave under the misapprehension that their brand owns the customer and so are reluctant to give ground to retailers.

So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us once again with the likes of SagePay, MGt, Boku, Zong, OpenMarket, MIG, Google and Facebook – not to mention banks and card companies – delivering the payment tools that people will use in the retail space: people trust these brands and retailers trust them too.

There is, of course, a very viable marketing for operator-based billing solutions and they are not going to go away in a hurry – not everyone has a smartphone, so pSMS is pretty much all they have to pay with – but my argument is that we are already seeing a shift in how mobile as a payment tool works and what the brands, media companies and retailers want from it. It poses a massive opportunity to the telemedia sector, but one that to my mind no one is really grasping.

One area where there is still huge opportunity for telemedia billing lies in mobile gambling services. Those of you at Telemedia360 last week will have noticed that mgambling was conspicuous by its absence. Well, that’s because we are running a dedicated show on mGambling – the mGaming Summit – on 15 June at the King’s Fund, in Central London, in partnership with iGamingBusiness. Details are here and it promises to be a fascinating event at the nexus of gambling and mobile.  See you there.