Ver Se Innovation, the company that runs NewsHunt, has launched a carrier billing platform iPayy, reports NextBigWhat.
According to the report, the company has currently partnered with Idea and Airtel to offer operator billing and it claims it will partner with Vodafone and another operator soon. It has also integrated PayPal allowing global merchants to take advantage of users from services such as Facebook, Zynga, among others. In April 2013, we noticed that Facebook discontinued support for Boku/Zong that allowed merchants to integrate carrier billing on services offered on Facebook.
For merchants, iPayy offers features such as Plug & Pay, customer management, in-built CRM, among others. iPayy provides Android and J2ME SDK for developers and merchants and platform can be integrated on all platforms such as Android, iOS, J2ME, WAP, among others. There’s also merchant portals where merchants can view transactions & billing revenue. NextBigWhat also reports that iPayy provides integration with analytic services such as Google Analytics allowing merchants to analyze their data at single place. More on the integration models here.
Ver Se’s entry in carrier billing platform is an interesting one: Ver Se’s primary business is job classifieds alerts on the mobile, for which consumers pay a subscription fee of around Rs 30 per month, through their telecom operator partners. It will be interesting if Ver Se provides a feature to include a subscription based model with iPayy. Subscription businesses in India are currently in a state of flux since the TRAI’s mandate of asking for user consent for renewals on subscriptions, and with SMS spam guidelines impacting marketing and fresh user activation.
Besides this, OTP leaves users frustrated as many phones do not have seamless switch between service and SMS inbox. Note that unlike transaction on desktop, in this case both SMS box and the service begs for screen attention. However to tackle this iPayy delivers the OTP as an USSD or a flash message for better user experience. This is possible as the platform detects the end users mobile number through iPayy’s Mobile Number Detection Technology.
As for transaction fees, Ver Se thinks that it has struck a good deal for the merchants. Out of the total revenue, operators will get around 30%, while iPayy will get around 5% and the remaining goes to the merchant. Remember that here merchant will have to do the promotion of the service that they offer.
Ver Se also owns NewsHunt, a mobile apps company which aggregates news feeds from multiple sources, and sells advertising for the app. It acquired NewsHunt last year.
