Fortumo adds bundling capabilities to PayRead for digital publishers

The mobile technology company Fortumo is connecting the Trident Bundling Platform to PayRead, its mobile identity and payments solution for digital publishers.

Publishers can now bundle their products with mobile operator postpaid and prepaid plans as well as with other digital service providers through PayRead in order to acquire new customers and convert them into subscribers.

Product bundling allows digital publishers to package their offers together with other companies’ services and incentivize users to sign up through promotional offers such as trials or discounted pricing. In exchange, the other party in the bundling partnership offers access to its customer base and marketing channels to increase the publisher’s visibility.

PayRead makes launching such partnerships scalable by managing the user authentication, entitlement and billing processes. Because the platform is integrated with 350 mobile operators and dozens of digital service providers globally, publishers do not need to spend time on partner prospection, onboarding and integrations.

“Bundle partnerships help digital publishers target new audience pockets who they are unable to reach on their own. For consumers, bundles offer a simple way to get access to premium offers through a service they already use; whether through their telco plan or together with a streaming service. PayRead helps launch such partnerships rapidly and test out multiple partners in parallel to figure out where the audience overlap is the strongest,” said Andrea Boetti, Head of PayRead at Fortumo.

Digital service bundling is frequently used in the music and video streaming industries, where companies use telco bundles to acquire new users. Telcos in return use bundle offers to upsell existing customers to premium service packs and convert prepaid subscribers to postpaid. Today, partnerships between network operators and streaming service providers are live in almost 80 countries. Recently, Fortumo announced that its bundling platform has been deployed for Amazon.

Bundling brings an additional benefit to digital publishers on the PayRead platform, who were previously able to authenticate users for sign-up through their mobile identity (phone number) and use the same identity to charge them for premium subscriptions or microtransactions for individual articles.

PayRead is built by Fortumo, the mobile technology company working with publishers including Schibsted, Magzter and Readwhere, as well as other leading digital merchants such as Google, Spotify and Amazon.