Mobile Billing
Mobile billing section is an optional component of our platform that integrates with billing service providers. It acts as a bridge between the content delivery platforms, mobile operators, billing service and content providers to enable billing for digital services and content.
It connects to interfaces of billing service providers and enables the content and service providers to receive the necessary customer billing information. It has also been used as the basis to enable a billing aggregator and could be used with third party delivery platforms.
Challenges
User and enterprise adoption of Internet and mobile billed services and content is increasing rapidly. As such it is increasingly important to ensure a consistent experience. However, with increasing numbers of operators and billing methods it is difficult to do so.
Services and content need to be delivered across a large and growing number of operators; each with different commercial terms, functionality and technical standards for billing. To make matters worse, commercial terms, regulations and the associated business rules are not static. Often it is necessary to apply new rules and regulations then to change the processing of the billing event accordingly.
Whilst billing aggregators provide a content or service provider the ability to use multiple operators across multiple countries through one technical and commercial connection; the aggregator must still need to be able to connect to multiple operators and other aggregators.
Similarly, content aggregators are positioned between billing service providers and content providers and require a flexible and robust solution providing all kinds of billing services via multiple operators. Content providers need a simple interface to all kinds of billing methods and billing service providers and not to be challenged again with the introduction of a new payment services such as Pay Pal, credit card, online shops, real world shops.
Features
The Mobile billing section has 4 main components:
Messaging Framework
Billing engine
Settlement Management
Subscription Management
Together they form a single, robust, reliable and flexible method to interface with business partners such as billing service providers, mobile operators, content aggregators, so that billing settlements and service subscriptions can be managed and processed. Its channels include adapters to connect to the most common mobile billing interfaces.
Messaging Framework
The messaging framework is responsible for service and business partner connectivity. It performs basic validation checks on received events and assigns business partner services to the events.
Billing engine
The billing engine receives an event incoming from the messaging framework and extracts the relevant billing information out of that event. After extracting the billing information the billing engine applies all relevant rules from the settlement and subscription management components. The billing engine is now providing the result of the validation process to the relevant business partner.
Settlement management
Settlement management implements the rules defined by business partner services related to billing events.
It combines billing event information with channel rules and service information, to be able to handle flexible billing scenarios (for example: combined payments and prepaid services). It defines associated clearance information to be applied to the billing event. The settlement management also holds the rules for fall back.
Subscription management
Subscription management holds information about end users subscribed to business partner's services. This information can be used for validation and clearance purposes.
