Mobile Billing Platform
GA-MBP is an optional component of GA-CDP 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. GA-MBP connects to interfaces of billing service providers and enables the content and service providers to receive the necessary customer billing information. GA-MBP 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 needs 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
GA-MBP has 4 main components:
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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. GA-MBP channels include adapters to connect to the most common mobile billing interfaces such as:
- Mobile Terminated billing (MT)
- Mobile originated billing (MO)
- M-payment offers
- Prepaid billing services (PayPal, bango)
- Premium billing provider (Netsize, Mblox, Echovox etc.)
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. Features include:
- Flexible and configurable message and billing events routing between billing provider services and content partner applications
- Support for all billing methods including credit card billing, Internet billing methods (for example: PayPal, WorldPay, Luupay)
- Supports out-of-the-box the most common protocols for SMS and MMS e.g. SMPP, UCP, EMI and MAM.
- Premium rate messaging support (Mobile Originated (MO) & Mobile Terminated messaging (MT)
Constraint rules
Constraint rules define the limits on billing services for example, daily limits, number of transactions and total turnover for a single end user or a single service instance.
Routing rules
Routing rules in the messaging framework define how to route events between billing provider services and business partner services. For example keyword logic for SMS or payment token for billing services is applied here.
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.
If required the billing engine will update the settlement and subscription information accordantly to the result of the validation process. Optionally other external systems could also been notified.
- Receives Events extracts billing information from event
- Validates billing information against settlement and subscription rules
- Updates settlement and subscription information
- Passes processed billing information to business partner’s services
- Optionally provides information to external billing systems
- Multiple billing channel and billing schema support
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 (e.g. not enough credit) and condition handling (e.g. invalid request).
- Combines billing event information with channel and service information
- Enables Flexible Billing models
- Flexible configuration for external settlement management
- Configurable for clearance purposes
- Rules for fall-back and condition handling
- Assigns billing events to partner application channels
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.
- Full control over traffic constraints, limitations
- Defines subscription rules and end-user policies
- User and service subscription management
- Opt in and opt out functionality
- Fraud detection capabilities
- Prepaid subscription handling
