Aggregators

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Valista enables Premium SMS and Content Aggregators to accelerate the growth of premium content, physical goods and services adoption in an off-deck environment.

Business Drivers

Payments Aggregation
Transaction visibility and pricing flexibility are key factors to successfully providing off-deck content to subscribers. A direct-to-bill charging service provides a more robust payment mechanism compared to Premium SMS. Aggregators and content providers are able to charge consumers more accurately and provide appropriate security, fraud protection and transparency for transactions.

Just as operators do, aggregators need to efficiently onboard content providers with a friendly merchant facing interface that allows merchants to manage their own content, pricing and merchandizing. In addition, they need to onboard operators to build the markets that attract content providers. This complex many-to-many position (i.e. many operators dealing with many content providers) - means that aggregators need a payments and revenue settlement solution that scales automatically across multiple content providers and multiple operators. They also need multi-currency solutions that support cross-border transactions.

Multi-party settlement
Today, a significant amount of settlement is calculated manually by operators. As merchandizing models get ever more complex, and with the emergence of advertising sponsored content and services, the need for aggregators to automate the settlement process is becoming ever more critical.

Solutions

Valista’s payments solution (Valista PaymentsPlus™) provides complete lifecycle management of transactions, helping to increase the volume of users as it is easy to use and transparent. It also helps to eliminate revenue leakage. Automated transaction processing ensures that payments are settled and goods delivered correctly and quickly (Valista SettlementPlus™). Without payments automation, the exploding numbers of content providers and premium services would swamp operators' and aggregators' management capabilities.

Valista PaymentsPlus ensures that transactions are routed quickly to the correct operator and payments are settled with the correct content provider across a wide variety of payment channels and transport protocols. The platform also provides greater transparency for the user, who can be requested to agree to the terms of any proposed payment or subscription service in advance of being charged, with the terms of such a service enforced on all related charges, eliminating overcharging. As a result, service providers can ensure consumer protection against unauthorized transactions and prevent fraud and revenue leakage.

PayForIt
The PayForIt scheme in the UK is the first move by operators to provide a standard direct-to-bill charging facility. PayForIt is the consumer facing brand of the UK's cross operator Trusted Mobile Payment Framework scheme. Other similar initiatives are already taking shape in other European countries. The scheme’s rules focus mostly on the payment experience that accredited payment intermediaries (aggregators) must serve up and other general guidelines designed to provide greater charging transparency for consumers. It's initially designed to manage off-deck WAP purchases, but this will be extended to cover web purchases in future. Valista’s payments solutions, PaymentsPlus, enabled mBlox to become the first company to announce accreditation in the new PayForIt scheme. Valista PaymentsPlus provides the robust, secure, transparent technology that mBlox needed to achieve PayForIt accreditation.

Click here for more information on PayForIt.

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