DOCOMO Digital
Unlocking New Revenue Streams for Mobile Carriers

Today, with increasing investments toward 5G development, mobile carriers seek revenue streams that can empower them by enhancing profitability via expanding subscriber bases. Additionally, the pandemic-driven growth in digital services also leads mobile network operators to capitalize on the rising opportunities. In pursuit of this, most mobile network operators collaborate with digital brands such as streaming service providers, games publishers, and others to develop customized offerings that combine carrier offerings with digital content. However, mobile carriers have to build a safe and secure payment avenue that links them with partner brands and end-users, which is effort and time-intensive. Typically, mobile carriers are also constrained by the limitations of their customer billing infrastructure and the underlying technology.

As the international payment business of NTT DOCOMO, one of the most innovative telecom companies in the world and pioneers in direct carrier billing (DCB), UK-based DOCOMO Digital addresses this need with its DCB platform-as-a-service and intuitive subscription service bundles. DOCOMO Digital allows mobile carriers to seamlessly ‘plug and play’ its offerings within existing infrastructure, minimizing internal resource drainage, CapEx reprioritization-related challenges, and driving significantly faster onboarding of new merchants. “As the largest integrator of Google Play carrier billing, we can help mobile carriers unlock higher digital services revenues. Our AI-powered predictive model significantly reduces the risk of bad debt for mobile carriers and enables them to grow their DCB revenues more profitably through easy and safe onboarding of global digital brands in hours.,” says Jonathan Bennett, Chief Commercial Officer, DOCOMO Digital.

By leveraging its DCB expertise, DOCOMO Digital enables mobile carriers and digital brands to drive higher user adoption, customer engagement and revenues. For digital merchants, the company’s bundling service eliminates hurdles caused by the lack of conventionally preferred modes of payment in emerging markets.As a result, digital brands can quickly and securely grow their user base in newer markets regardless of the maturity of their financial infrastructure while significantly reducing the need to invest in marketing needed to drive user adoption.

In fact, with DOCOMO Digital’s platform, digital merchants can connect with hundreds of mobile carriers worldwide, choose the specific markets they want to access, and set-up attractive subscription bundles customized for the users of specific mobile carriers. DOCOMO Digital’s customers can customize the payment options (conventional cards and popular eWallets) offered to end-users based on the geographies and most suitable payment methods.

Highlighting the core competencies of DOCOMO Digital’s portfolio is a customer success story. It assisted Turkey-based Turkcell in expanding the user base and revenue-generation of their fintech arm, Paycell. Initially, Paycell’s goals were to grow their revenues from app store DCB, reach more app store users, and boost DCB transaction numbers. With DOCOMO Digital’s expertise in driving adoption and transaction volumes for app stores, the customer could garner a five-fold growth in average monthly paying users in Google Play Store between Q4 2015 to Q4 2020. At the same time, the company also enabled a four-fold increase in revenues and a 69 percent growth in paying users in the Huawei App Gallery between Q1 2020 and Q4 2020.

By leveraging its DCB expertise, DOCOMO Digital enables mobile carriers and digital brands to drive higher user adoption, customer engagement and revenues

Moving forward, DOCOMO Digital aims to boost its ability to support mobile carriers and digital merchant partners even further. To achieve this, the company is poised to become cloud-first with state-of-the-art, AI/ML-powered analytics capable of assisting its customers in managing their entire customer lifecycles better with advanced analytics. Concurrently, DOCOMO Digital wants to establish a micro-service-based architecture that supports digital merchants to self-onboard (via developer toolkits and SDK kits) and customize integrations with DCB, eWallet, and other payment methods based on their unique requirements.