Two of the world's largest telecoms groups, Telenor and Telefónica, have teamed up to make Telenor APIs available on Telefónica's BlueVia platform, a shared API platform for building and marketing applications. This is another step in Telenor's effort to drive flexible mobile payment solutions for customers.
With Telenor on board, the BlueVia platform will initially focus on mobile payments, making it possible to charge mobile customers for content and application purchases directly on their mobile phone bills. In addition, Telenor and Telefónica will soon grow their offering to include other APIs that target different areas of the market.
"Telenor joins the BlueVia platform as an equal partner, and we extend an invitation to other global telcos to join us in this new way of working together," said Rolv-Erik Spilling, SVP and Deputy Head Telenor Digital Services.
"BlueVia has been widely praised for its innovative approach and for providing developers with a platform to build applications and mobile web services that will run on BlueVia's own infrastructure. We want our fellow telcos to understand the benefits of joining BlueVia in helping to monetize assets while simultaneously making it easier for customers to purchase content and applications," Spilling added.
Telenor and Telefónica will work together to roll out the platform across their mobile customer bases. The two telcos share the belief that the ease and convenience of operator billing payments will help increase downloads of paid mobile content, such as apps. This is especially relevant in developing markets where banking and credit card penetration is low.
"From the beginning, BlueVia's aim has been to gain scale and experiment fast on API business, not sticking to Telefónica's footprint, but rather expanding our vision to a pure global ecosystem. Telenor is leading the industry in embracing this vision. We are glad to work with them, initially in mobile payments, but also in exploring other innovative APIs aimed at different areas of the market," said Jose Valles, Head of BlueVia.
Telenor - driving flexible mobile payment solutions for customers
Following previous announcement of Telenor's partnership with Google Play, Telenor has entered id into similar agreements with Microsoft and Facebook to further stimulate these ecosystems. Through these agreements Telenor customers will experience easier access to greater and richer mobile content, as well as flexible payment solutions.
"Customers show a growing preference for charging payments on the phone bill rather than to credit cards or PayPal. Operator billing thus enables developers to more easily monetize on their products. It's important for us to offer this as a solution in as many channels as possible," says Rolv-Erik Spilling in Telenor.