Fortumo connects Amazon to carrier billing with BSNL India

The mobile technology company Fortumo has deployed its Trident Bundling Platform to connect Amazon with the Indian telco BSNL. Thanks to the integration, BSNL is offering its subscribers one year of Amazon Prime in select plans. Prime is the best in shopping and entertainment from Amazon.

“Interest towards VOD services is today growing the fastest in South-East Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Local telecommunication companies and their marketing capabilities offer the best way for VOD providers to engage this audience. Fortumo’s Trident supports VOD providers in getting these new users on board as quickly as possible. For users this means they do not need to enter a credit card for payment, as they pay through their mobile operator,” said Andrea Boetti, VP of Global Business Development at Fortumo.

OTT providers use bundles with telecommunication companies to acquire new users, focusing especially on countries where traditional marketing channels are inefficient. Telecommunication companies in return use bundle offers to upsell existing users to premium service packs and convert prepaid subscribers to postpaid. Today, partnerships between network operators and OTT video service providers are live in almost 80 countries.

India, where the Amazon Prime offering with BSNL was launched, has a rapidly growing mobile industry with 303% growth in mobile data consumption over the past year, according to Tefficient. The country has a significant gap between access to digital entertainment and online payments: while smartphone penetration in the country is above 35%, only 3% of the adult population owns a credit card. Additional information on the country can be found from Fortumo’s recent market report.

Fortumo’s Trident Bundling Platform allows OTT companies to quickly scale up partnerships with mobile operators, ISP-s and TV service providers. Integration with the platform has to be completed only once. After that, Trident supports OTT companies with the following:
•Multiple bundle partnerships through one integration
•Multiple commercial scenarios: hard bundling, add-ons and reselling
•End-to-end consumer lifecycle management: service discovery, activation, authentication, entitlement, renewals and user management, termination
•Analytics and reporting tools for reconciliation and settlement processes