Andy Moore

The mobile payments industry has been crying out for a mobile payment scheme that’s cross network, standardised, user and merchant friendly.

It’s not here yet so when can we have it?

This depends on who you talk to. March, April, May, June and July have all been quoted to me recently.

What are the alternatives?

Pay Pal are well positioned to take the bull by the horns and get awesome penetration but they’ve gone for SMS payments over ‘WAP’. They’ve got millions of users and could run a mobile payment API in over 100 countries.

Premium SMS isn’t available in an ‘open garden‘ click and buy environment, it’s not the most friendly thing towards conversion rates when you have to ask your potential customer to leave your site and send you a message. It’s a bad user experience on the mobile internet.

Premium rate calls could easily be initiated onclick but would levy premium charges to the user for calling on a mobile, there’s then expecting them to key in order codes and delivery numbers so again it’s not user friendly and leaves the customer with a bitter taste.

Credit cards while reported to be successful in a mobile internet environment for age verification are complicated to enter on mobile devices. Multi element forms on the mobile internet can be pretty hard to navigate and propagate.

Dialoques X-Pay / WAP ID service is the nearest to Pay For It right now that I can see. MSISDN detection, shortcode whitelisting and subsequent onlick billing make it viable but it’s lacking in the uniformity and network support of the ‘Pay For It’ brand.

BT Agile Media has a solution in place too. The commercial model is similar to that of Dialogue and the use of aliases sounds similar. What does stand out to me with Agile Media is that the tracking of aliases makes me think of Bango’s user ID system.
……….

I’ve developed a one click billing solution for existing customers on our mobile site. They’re shown links to browse content once they’ve downloaded their order.

By being a customer they’re already white listed by our aggregator on the short code we bill them from so all we needed to do was track state and initiate a new order via reverse billing when the customer clicked the ‘agree’ link.

Our in-house click and browse system makes it as easy as possible for existing customers to buy again, it is truly one click though not without drawbacks.

1) It only works with existing customers (walled garden)
2) They have to follow the breadcrumb trail we set them

……….

Enter Pay For It

I spent the best part of Friday afternoon on the phone to a number of aggregators and scouring the web for information!

I found it discouraging that the official PayForIt website is a 123-reg holding page: payforit.org payforit.mobi and other extensions lead to uninformative holding pages too.

This tells me for sure it’s not ready yet, so far it’s quiet, I’m sure when it’s really here they’ll tell us about it. The networks will make some noise, after all they’re said to have invested five million in this. They’ll want a return.

So what is it?

“It’s a chip and pin terminal experience for the mobile internet” Gavin Shurmer, Head of Third Party Services, Orange.

Pay For It is otherwise known as a ‘Trusted Mobile Payment Scheme‘ (TMPS) and is said to be a cross operator initiative to provide the user with a safe, secure, easy to use payment method. Users are charged to their mobile phone’s pre-pay (pay as you go) or post-pay account making it transparent and safe, it’s a simple ‘click to buy’ action and is intended to be a unified approach to making mobile payments easy.

Pay For It is constructed under the auspices of the Cross-Mobile Network Operator forum of the Mobile Data Association.

“The Trusted Mobile Payment Framework (TMPF) is an initiative between the UK networks to promote the take up of mobile commerce by allowing merchants and content providers access to cross network payment services.”

It’s developed to ease the management of:

One off payments
Subscription set up
Subscription payments
Subscription management
Refunds
MSISDN pass through
Customer care
Audit tracking

……….

There’s a few people pushing PFI already though none of them are ready to roll.

According to the Mobile Data Association newseltter in September 2ergo were the first to become accredited.

2Ergo Pay For It Brief

At the same time Dialogue were showing off their browse and buy service at Mobile Content World.

Browse and Buy Mobile Payments
WAP ID Data sheet

Tanla Mobile say the service was launched in August last year and so far are the only people who’ve been able to show me outpayments on Pay For It. Albeit not live yet Tanla is PFI at a more reasonable cost than the Dialogue WAP ID service. £200 setup vs £1,000 set up.

According to Mobile Marketing Magazine Hybyte announced “Air Payment” in January. The website says it’s soon to release the Air Payment Interface to third parties though there’s a form to fill in to get more info when it’s released.

Hybyte info request form

BT Agile Media WAP Billing

……….

It’s frustrating. Nobody can connect to PFI yet. Some aggregators claim to be waiting on contracts from Orange and O2. Others claim they’re ready to roll but with nothing to back up the hot air.

I’ve heard that O2 want to make Pay For It mandatory for mobile internet payments by April this year yet a number of people have said it’s O2 who are the ones holding it back.

The likes of Mblox and MX Telecom (the two names I trust most in premium SMS) are not going to take an incomplete system to market so we’ll have to wait for test cycles to complete and most likely wait for the initial billing cycle to be completed before the aggregators push this out to us mere mortals.

Say they get PFI in April, testing will take it to May, completion of the billing cycle will take it to June or July before we see it.

For the customer it’ll be a standard payment screen into both one off purchases and subscriptions. It’ll become well known and should benefit the growth of the mobile internet. It’ll be a standard interface on the understanding that being consistant will develop consumer trust. I guess this is an industry way of building trust after the ‘episode with the Frog’ and the ‘ringtone resentment‘ we’ve felt from the public since.

Standard payment window:

Standard subscription window:

Standard thanks window:

It’ll look uniform to the end user but to mobile geeks there are differences:

Vodafone will most likely use their M-Pay back-end.
Orange will most likely use their Kiosk back-end.
O2 will use premium SMS
T-Mobile will use premium SMS
Three will use premium SMS

Uh? Where’s the unification?

These are meant to be refundable transactions yet refunding premium SMS is a no can do as it stands today so what’s to say it’ll work in time for PFI?

So payments are pretty much PSMS. Out payments I expect to be pretty much PSMS too. Though I’m expecting Vodafone and Orange to take a little more than the rest. Most people I’ve spoken to have said they’ll be giving lower outpayments than PSMS on PFI.

If you’re hoping to be able to plug PFI into your web site in addition to your mobile site you’ll be waiting longer I’m afraid. Standard web support isn’t said to be available till version 2 of the TMPF comes out.

As for how it works. The pages the customer sees and the back end that handles the billing isn’t handled by the merchants or service providers, it’s handled by aggregators who are pre-approved by the networks and have achieved ‘Accredited Payment Intermediary‘ status.

Us merchants then connect to the Pay For It API through guess what, an API!

From a developers point of view I find it exciting that the mobile internet is maturing to have it’s own domain extension and payment system, I also find it frustrating I can’t have a system in place today.

Not that I’m impatient or anything…..

Links, references and resources:

M-Payments about to go mainstream
Mblox announces UK mobile internet billing success
M-Bill - txtnation
WAP billing mCommerce from MMP Global
Valista - achieving TMPF accreditation
WIN Plc Newsletter with PFI info
MIG Solutions Mobile Billing
Orange Kiosk
Vodafone M-Pay
Mobinode review of mobile payments
Ericsson IPX (Internet Payment Exchange)
Comments and track backs welcome.

Well I’m really honoured, I’ve been asked to help moderate the forums over on Ad Mob.

forum.admob.com

Thanks folks, I am honoured and really proud to be able to play a part, as minor as it may be, anyone who knows me or reads posts here will know I hold them in high esteem.

From the second I heard about Ad Mob I’ve thought it was a brilliant idea and the forums there are sure to grow into a great place for mobile developers to learn, share and hang out.

(Personal gong moment!)

The WURLF has been updated.

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/

2.0.4 is now available for download

Got a WAP site?
Curious about your users?

How to detect the carrier of a mobile phone
from the IP it uses on your WAP site

> download

Running a busy WAP site I’ve been able to build up a pretty comprehensive database of mobile phone IP addresses, user agent and content accept values. This is a huge database that has over two and a half million records and weighs in at 1.3gb. By the time I break it down to unique entries we get a few thousand, from those I’m able to compile this rough list of carriers from their IP address.

I say rough as it needs cleaning up to make the carrier names more ‘human friendly’ rather than being the DNS labels they are. Example DTAG-DIAL14 translates to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile. The data is there, do with it what you wish.

I’ve crunched through this data with some PHP to try and work out the carriers the handsets were using. I then trimmed it by hand to cut a load of spiders, robots, fixed (home or office) connections and other garb that made no sense.

Many of the obscure entries have been checked, many speak volumes without the need to investigate.

If you just want a list of IP addresses used on the mobile internet, their corresponding carrier and the ISO code of the country you can find it here.

This list is by no means exhaustive and only represents the clicks I’ve tracked through the route to market we hold. There’s many more carriers out there than are listed here but if you need to build a carrier specific WAP application and have no data to go on this should perform well as a starting point.

If you use on your WAP site please link to mine.
www.web2txt.co.uk/wap

If you’re more curious as to why anyone would want this or want to know how to harvest this data for your own use I’ll to elaborate a little……

Why you might need it:

You run a WAP site and you need to show users content which is specific to not just their handset but their locale. Such as ordering information, the right currency or maybe even multi-language versions of your mobile site.

You use different SMS aggregators for premium messaging and get different payouts on different networks. It would make sense to show the the user the short code from the aggregator who has the higher payouts.

You’re a stats geek or mobile media whore and just buzz off this kind of thing.

How it came about:

I was impressed when the leading mobile advertising agency Admob upgraded their front page to show incoming traffic, the handset, the country and the actual carrier or network that the user is connecting through. Not just great into but presented in a funky way too.

The way Admob show this to the public looks slick and stylish, as for how they do it on the back end I can only guess. I know have good budgets and a fantastic team of people onboard. What follows here is a poor mans version and lacks any front-end. It’s just a file.

The options to do this through companies like Dialogue cost so much I let out a little wee when I laughed so hard. As much as I love the idea of their Browse and Buy service I have a policy that means I refuse to pay for an API connection.

How to get the data:

Some time back I found a PHP class called Get By Ip that will get the residing country of an IP address by running a query through a Whois Server like whois.arin.net

If we just want to know the country of an IP address this is a cost effective and robust way of getting the data. The limitations of holding state on WAP sites means cookies and sessions can’t always be relied upon and the possibility of having to run a query for each page view means that commercial services like Max Mind are out of the question.

Since I’ve used it I’ve thought Max Mind is a great service and well priced, 99% accurate and half a million queries costs very little really. I just got another million today for $100. It’s just that 500,000 web queries would be eaten up in no time by a busy mobile site. I use it on the website but that can track state with sessions and cookies so it’s okay.

The PHP class above just takes the IP address and returns a few values:

• host
• netname
• country
• person
• address
• phone
• email

Where it says phone this is the contact number of the person responsible for the netblock of the IP queried and NOT the number of the mobile phone browsing your site. Getting a mobile users actual MSISDN is a different story, again Dialogue have the ability to do this but they don’t give you the number, they just give you an encrypted string that ties up with the data on their end. When you want to message (or even bill) that user you send them the encrypted string, they decode it and send your text.

It’s the netname that holds the info we really need. It might return null in which case for that IP it’s game over but this is the way I was able to create the list.

If you use this data on your WAP site please link to us:
www.web2txt.co.uk/wap - thanks.

It’s taken several hours of crunching to build this list plus months of building traffic and logging data so a link or two isn’t too much to ask for.

> download