BSG adds mobile bill payment to payment gateway

Through its relationships with service providers, BSG Clearing Solutions claims it can touch every household in the U.S. and help providers charge for content and other services from third parties. But that’s not enough. BSG wants to touch every mobile user as well. So the company launched a mobile payment solution called Bill2Phone-Mobile that allows multimedia merchants to deliver digital content to mobile phones and bill for them on subscribers’ mobile phone bills.

The company launched a similar landline service earlier this year, which runs on the company’s Advanced Payment Gateway service. The mobile payment feature also is part of the APG. It will allow more than 240 million mobile subscribers to charge purchases of off-deck mobile content--such as games, videos, news, sports and stock updates--to their mobile phone bill. BSG already processes 20 billion transactions annually through its relationships with over 1,400 network operators.

“We are getting implementations done on the landline side this year and are ahead of forecasts,” said Randall Brouckman, CEO of BSG. “But we quickly recognized the need to get beyond every household in the U.S. and out to every mobile phone.”

BSG acts as the middleman, or third-party clearing house, that clears transactions and financial settlement between thousands of entities. It allows merchants to bypass the need for establishing multiple billing agreements with wireless, wireline, IP operators, content aggregators, credit card acquirers and risk management providers.

The Biil2Phone-Mobile service also includes a content management platform. And future releases may include an electronic-wallet capability.

Brouckman said he has several mobile operators clamoring for early field trials and two are going live with trials by the end of the year. “The more the merrier, I say,” Brouckman said. He added that a charging solution such as this will help small content providers who couldn’t other wise for a relationship with large operators get in the game.

While short message service (SMS) appears to be the preferred method so far for getting third-party content billed on a phone or mobile bill. Brouckman doesn’t see that as a long-term solution. “I would like to see the industry mature over time to become more like the fixed-line side,” he said. “SMS has its purpose, but standards like WAP billing are a big step in the right direction.”