Discover Digital has unveiled a Common Operator Billing Interface (COBI) solution which aims to simplify billing interfaces.
The company explains the solution combines payment and billing systems, and can interlink with multiple banks, loyalty services, mobile wallets and the client's own billing systems. It also features its own vouchering capability and can be re-designed for loyalty programmes.
Discover Digital offers end-to-end technology solutions, including payment technologies such as internal client billing integrations, mobile money and credit card integrations.
COBI, which was developed in SA under a service agreement with Discover Digital International, is not unique to the digital services industry and can be rolled out for any industry as a middleman between a service and third-party vendors.
According to Stephen Watson, MD of Discover Digital, COBI was conceived to address the challenge of integrating multiple partners' billing systems.
"The system was initially designed to meet the needs of our telco clients. In our work with telcos' on taking a digital value-added service (VAS) to market, one of the key processes is billing integrations.
"Telcos typically have a number of billing partners like banks for credit card merchant services, third-party voucher services, and the telcos' own business support system partners for charge to bill, data balance debits or mobile wallets. What ends up happening is you might have up to nine integrations into a VAS solution.
"We felt multiple integrations into our own environment presented inefficiencies, risk, more requirements for troubleshooting and more opportunities for things to go wrong. We decided to build a common interface so that a single integration is needed into a telco, after which all other integrations are done just between the transaction switch and the third parties," says Watson.
The system proved to be effective as a billing and payment switch, so the provider set it to benefit service providers across multiple industry verticals. It now supports additional payment options for instant EFT real-time secure payments from all of the five major banks; bank EFT via Sage Pay at any of the four major local banks; cash payments using a barcode presented to participating retailers including Checkers, Checkers Hyper, Shoprite, OK, USave, House and Home, and the SA Post Office; and payments via a Masterpass online digital wallet.
"Clients can activate multiple billing options quickly via a single API integration to COBI, which subsequently manages multiple integrations with selected billing. A significant advantage to aggregating all of your payment systems through one solution is that you can connect advanced analytics across the entire spectrum of the customer base. One can look at how many transactions are mobile-money-based, the success of vouchers versus loyalty, and so forth. This solution consolidates it all and delivers analytics on one's consumers," notes Watson.
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