For ISPs seeking a way to integrate value added services with their current portfolios, Trivnet offers a powerful, multi-platform, one-click billing solution.

by Jeff Goldman [September 24, 2001]

Trivnet was founded back in of July 1997. According to Yoav Ecker, Trivnet vice president of marketing and product management, the company was created to solve the problem of micropayments.

"The commission that credit card companies take upon micropayments is very high," Ecker said. "So we tried to leverage the existing billing relationship that the ISPs already have with their subscribers, and allow them to charge every transaction they make on their monthly bill."

But online payments have simplified since Trivnet was founded—the question posed by their first press release, "How do you Buy a Hot Dog on the Internet," isn't as challenging as it was four years ago. And so Trivnet shifted its focus earlier this year to the mobile phone industry: the new market, Ecker says, was an obvious choice.

"They are looking for value added services, and the relationship between the customer and the mobile operator is much stronger than the relationship with the ISP," he said.

Trivnet info@trivnet.com

Still, while they'll be targeting mobile phone operators, Trivnet won't turn down an ISP interested in offering its customers value added services bundled into subscriber's monthly bills. Take a look at their Web site and you'll see payment solutions listed for ISPs, broadband access providers, and telcos as well as mobile operators.

"It's a matter of focus; that's all," Ecker said. "We are not a big company; we don't have unlimited resources."

Trivnet is headquartered in Israel, with satellite offices in New York, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Singapore. A joint venture with Mitsubishi puts the company on good footing to enter the Japanese market, while current customers include Israel's Cellcom and Singapore's SingTel.

Keep it simple
From the user's side of things, Trivnet's payment solution pares online or mobile transactions down to a single click—no need to enter a user name and password, and no need to enter any credit card information. The user is validated as a subscriber, and the purchase is made automatically. "It's a really seamless, simple, click-and-buy process," Ecker said.

In order to facilitate this kind of simplicity, the ISP has to set up arrangements with merchant partners, who then install a simple API that connects back to the ISP. And the customer doesn't have to do a thing. "The nice thing about it, and we have a patent on this, is the automatic identification," Ecker said. "As long as you're a subscriber of the ISP that bought our solution, you're automatically identified, and the money is charged to your monthly bill."

The ISP solution runs on Linux and NT, and the mobile solution has been upgraded to include Solaris. A number of APIs facilitate integration with legacy systems, and a plug-in to Portal's Infranet billing software is available to users who already have Infranet installed. The extensive implementation process includes lab tests, field tests, and commercial pilots to make sure it's an appropriate solution for your customer base.

The product also offers an enormous amount of flexibility, including a branding tool that aids in customizing the interfaces to your look and feel, a key asset in customer retention. Other options include the ability to support billing through the ISP or through a credit card, and multilingual support options including Hebrew, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.

The original model for the solution, Ecker recalls, had Trivnet setting up the arrangements on behalf of merchants and ISPs. Over the last year, he says, they've distanced themselves from that side of the business. "Instead of selling service, we're selling a technological platform in which the ISP does the entire operation by itself," he said.

Similarly, the original pricing model involved revenue sharing with minimal upfront fees, but the company soon decided that a higher-volume approach would be more appropriate. The current pricing model for Trivnet's solution is per license or per transaction.For example, Ecker says, you could agree to purchase 100 million transactions in bulk; when those are used up, you'd buy the next 100 million in order to keep things running.

Above and beyond
The best thing about Trivnet, Ecker says, is that you don't have to recruit your customers to sign up for it. "It automatically enables the entire customer base of the operator," he said. "We know that anything that needs the customer to be active is usually doomed to failure, so the entire customer base is automatically enabled. There's no need for pre-registration by the user."

According to Ecker, Trivnet's simplicity makes it virtually unique among the competition. "If you look up 'payments' on the Internet, you'll get about 900 different payment solutions," he said. "About 99 percent of them are very simple solutions—the customer has to pre-register; he has to enter his credit card details, and then with a user name and password he sends out the credit card details to the merchant. That's a version which doesn't solve the user's fear of credit card abuse."

The Singapore-based ISP SingNet, a division of SingTel, boasts over 300,000 subscribers. Visit SingNet's site, and thanks to a partnership with Trivnet, you'll see an option to "Shop the easy way at EzPurchase." Click on the link, and as part of their trial launch, you can charge ringtones, e-books, financial reports, MP3s, games, and more to your SingNet monthly bill.

According to Andrew Buay, CEO of SingTel's Multimedia Group, there's one key reason why Trivnet was a perfect solution for SingNet's user base: for many of them, it's not just a matter of preferring to avoid having to enter credit card information online. "More than 35 percent of surfers are under twenty," he said. "This age group does not own credit cards."

He adds that SingTel doesn't have any expectations of earning huge revenues from the service. Instead, the hope is that if a customer is made to feel safe spending money online through an ISP, they're a lot more likely to stick around. "We don't see it as a substantial revenue generator, but rather a value added service for our customers," he said.

On the mobile phone side, a recent commercial pilot with Israel's Cellcom demonstrated enormous customer interest in the service. Cellcom's executives hoped that the 500 subscribers testing the service would make repeated purchases during the trial, and according to Ecker, they were more than satisfied. "I was very happy to see that the percentage of repeat purchases was very high, compared even to any kind of retail pilot," he said. "We're very, very excited."

— End  

Billing systems & services series:
		BillMax by iSpark	Infranet by Portal
		Emerald by IEA Software	Platypus by Boardtown
		GlarNet	PRISM by Inovaware

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