Dr. Windsor Holden, head of consultancy and forecasting at Juniper Research, tells CalvinAyre.com’s Rebecca Liggero how online gambling operators will benefit from having their customers be able to charge directly to their mobile bill.
The online gambling sector presents many opportunities, especially in the payment mechanisms.
For Dr. Windsor Holden, head of consultancy and forecasting at Juniper Research, believes charge to mobile billing services is the way forward. Carrier billing is still at its early stages, with only one player—Probability—to have launched a charge to bill on its gambling services in 2014.
“I think the opportunity is very significant,” Holden told CalvinAyre.com. “Now, most carrier billing deployments focus on essentially one-way transaction: you pay the bill and you receive the goods.”
However, carrier billing today focuses on one-way transactions, which poses problems for the online gambling industry.
“Now, most carrier billing deployments focus on essentially one-way transaction: you pay the bill and you receive the goods. Now, the problem facing the gambling industry is how you account for two-way transactions and lots of them, otherwise the problem is if each of your transactions is recorded on the phone bill, then obviously, the amount of bets or wagers placed even in a single session, you’ll wind up with a phone bill that’s 10 feet long,” Holden explained.
Holden said it’s the job of network operators and platform providers to fix this issue.
“To begin with, the network operators and the platform providers need to ensure that there is a solution in place that’s conducive to this kind of payment, be it a mobile wallet solution that, for example, enables payment via carrier billing,” he said.
If the said issue is fixed, Holden said online gambling industry operators would truly benefit from having their customers be able to charge directly to their mobile bill.
“It’s one-click transaction, it’s as simple as that. If you’ve got that facility on your mobile phone, where if you want to place a bet or if you want to play online poker and you place a bet just with a one click, it’s enormously convenient,” Holden noted. “If you look at the markets where carrier billing has been introduced, you see an absolutely dramatic surge in transaction volumes, and furthermore, it enables people who just don’t want to put their bank details into, you know, on the Internet, it enables you to monetize those customers for the first time.”
