‘Carrier Billing Global Outlook and Opportunities’ is the new MEF executive insights video series sponsored by Bango. This series hears key industry voices examine the state of the carrier billing market.
In the first video, London-based Principal Analyst at Ovum, Guillermo Escofet gives an overview of the expansive carrier billing market. He details the key drivers of carrier billing’s monumental growth and explains how emerging trends are creating new opportunities.
Carrier billing’s market revenue has seen a period of stagnation, but is now growing faster than operator data incomes total transactional revenue. Guillermo suggests that, “by 2023 it will have overtaken global SMS revenue in terms of volume.” Moreover, he says that globally it will grow from, “$18 billion… to about $45 billion by the end of the forecast period, which is 2022.” Bigger, established companies such as Google have aided the growth by supporting the payment method in around 50 countries. Guillermo states that, “regrowth… (of) Direct Carrier Billing revenue was mostly driven by app store billing and also bundling deals between music streaming companies and operators. The app stores make up the single biggest component of the carrier billing market in terms of revenue.” At present they dominate two fifths of the market and have the potential for massive growth.
In the video, Guillermo details that the influx of music, video and game streaming are other key drivers that have aided Direct Carrier Billing (DCB) regrowth. While games appear to be the biggest revenue makers for DCB, music and video providers like Spotify and Netflix are expediting their DCB activity in mature markets by offering bundling and setup box integration with mobile operators. For example, he explains that, “media providers… are acquiring paid customers (through) leveraging… the relationship operators have with their customers.” Escofet estimates that this strategy may see DCB account for ten per cent of all OTT (over the top) video revenues by 2022. Guillermo suggests that carrier billing is the most universal way of bridging the gap between people’s devices that are compatible with these services, and credit or debit cards that would allow them to pay for the services.