The mobile payments company, Fortumo today launches the 'hybrid subscriptions', a product that leverages carrier billing to enable merchants to provide access to content on a limited time basis in low-income markets. The product is intended to complement Fortumo's subscription payments solution where recurring billing has proven to be ineffective and in markets where carriers have not enabled it.
The hybrid subscriptions allow users to select a time duration for content access and then pay for it on their phone bill. This means streaming merchants like Spotify or Netflix can enable daily or weekly access to entertainment with scaled pricing, significantly increasing the amount of users who can afford to make payments. Fortumo’s hybrid subscriptions product is intended for music and video streaming companies, digital newsstands, web and server hosting providers, social networks, dating sites and other merchants whose existing business model is based on recurring payments.
According to Fortumo, its hybrid subscriptions are available to merchants across all 88 markets that Fortumo covers through one payment integration. Fortumo also provides recurring billing using mobile payments in more than 20 countries, among them Brazil, France, United Kingdom, Sweden, Romania and India. Pilot merchants using hybrid subscriptions are seeing approximately 1.6x higher payment conversion from hybrid subscriptions compared to regular one-off payments, added Fortumo.
Martin Koppel, CEO of Fortumo
People living in countries like India, Thailand and Nigeria can access online content but cannot pay for it due to the lack of credit cards. The pricing of this content is often mismatched with local income since most users cannot afford a $9.99 subscription for 30 days. Merchants we work with have found success by going local, for example by charging $0.49 for daily or $2.49 for weekly access. This means hybrid subscriptions with carrier billing give merchants a single technical platform to adapt their business for local market conditions and consequently grow their revenue.
