Up until now, the question has been "How can a mobile operator help me accept payments from mobile subscribers"? Collecting payments for applications & services via operator billing systems has always been an attractive proposition for application & service providers since it leverages the operator's existing relationship with the customer, and simplifies the process for all parties involved.   However, the thought of attempting to integrate with even one operator can be overwhelming in itself, let alone looking at integrating with the multiple operators required in order to truly enable this form of payment within a given region.  

Some businesses such as Zong have managed to perform the integration to several different operators over a long period of time, and use this as the basis of their product offering.  See: 

http://zong.com/zong/coverage.gsp

Enter OneAPI.  The premise of OneAPI is to provide application developers with a set of common, lightweight and web-friendly API's that enable easy access to mobile operator network capabilities.  Currently, developers need to work with each operator's specific API's in order to leverage capabilities such as payment, messaging, and location.  OneAPI will simplify things for the developers and will drive increased usage of these operator services.  

With OneAPI, application & service providers can spend more time working on their service offering and less time worrying about how to make the service available to their market.  Furthermore, with the ability to leverage operator billing systems to manage payment, the overall eco-system becomes a lot less complex for these providers.  It decreases the number of integration points overall and simplifies their business at the same time.  Most importantly, it improves the overall customer experience since customers don't have to fumble around to pull out their credit cards, or look-up other information to enable the payment.  As we've seen with Apple's application store, a simple, easy to use payment mechanism translates to a good customer experience, ultimately resulting in increased sales.

At the GSMA MWC in Barcelona, the GSMA announced a commercial pilot in Canada as part of its OneAPI initiative, working with Bell Mobility, Rogers Communications, and TELUS to demonstrate the viability and benefits. ( http://gsmworld.com/newsroom/press-releases/2010/4632.htm ).  If the pilot is successful, OneAPI will be the silver lining in the cloud of mobile payments for operators.  A successful pilot will undoubtedly lead to increased adoption around the world, and application providers will have a viable means for processing payments through the operators.

Posted on: Monday, March 1, 2010