Engagement party

Combining the convenience of DCB with interaction services is a powerful draw for media companies, charities and other businesses. And, as Paul Skeldon reports, that has prompted the launch of a very special telemedia player

Part of the power of carrier billing is how it can deliver rapid payments. Where some baulk at the revenue share not being on a par with credit card (yet), for many businesses its convenience makes it worth the cost.

This convenience, as we have seen, makes carrier billing an ideal on-boarding tool for all sorts of services and combining that with the power of interaction with content, services and businesses is a no brainer.

For years, DCB has underpinned how competitions are monetised – but what if the sort of engagement that these traditional services have created could be monetised to an even greater extent?

This is something that media groups, charities and other businesses are in sore need of exploiting. Many run some form of engagement and many do monetise it, but not as fully – nor with as much up- and cross-selling – as they could.

Btu what if that could change?

In a world where interaction is paramount and monetisation a necessary credo, offering billable interactions is a must.

That is the thinking behind Viveri Group, which is aiming to help businesses of all kinds maximise audience engagement and monetisation like never before. According to the company’s branding, it aims to bring together crypto, open banking, DCB and customer engagement to offer automated, multi-channel engagement across all digital channels for all sorts of businesses.

The building blocks of Viveri lie in payment tech provider Dynamic Mobile Billing (DMB) and engagement business

Spoke. Spoke has all the engagement nous – working with the likes of the DEC, BBC, Reach Plc and events, which include the Eurovision Song Contest and ITV’s Soccer Aid for UNICEF – while DMB is an international payments business handling more than 500 million transactions a year across 12 territories.

Together, these two companies can offer a level of monetisable interactions not yet seen in the media, charity and entertainment sectors.

Match Made In Interactive Heaven

The pairing of DMB and Spoke is something of a match made in heaven. DMB’s billing platform and reach is ideal for these sorts of services, but it lacks the interactivity play. Spoke, on the other hand, already works with all the main media companies, charities and events, but has not had the payment part. Together, these two companies can deliver an impressive and easy way for media companies to jump to the next level of monetisable interaction.

“It’s very much what the media market wants and needs,” says Gary Corbett, chairman of DMB and Viveri’s major shareholder. “They need to go further than just competitions, they have all that content to monetise, which they can do through interaction. They can up- and cross-sell and expand their revenue and capabilities.”

The move also helps expand the reach of carrier billing, believes Corbett. “It allows media companies and charities that are already using DCB to expand how they use it and what they use it for,” he says.

TELEMEDIA 2.0?

The move exemplifies the wider trend seen in the telemedia sector for consolidation. Telemedia Magazine has for several years now espoused the aggregation of services to better serve businesses and consumers. As technologies such as customer engagement and interaction have improved and expanded across verticals, the need to offer a more cohesive set of services has grown. www.viveri.com

We have already witnessed this in the messaging and engagement market around customer service, with many messaging providers becoming cloud based CPaaS platforms (see page 12). The same is now happening with the integration of billing and payments with engagement strategies. Expect to see more of this sort of thing, particularly the integration of DCB and messaging, along with adding new payment tools such as open banking and crypto into the mix – just as Viveri is doing and it ushers in the era of Telemedia 2.0.

“The formation of Viveri also means that DMB can also now offer media companies and charities a wide range of payments, including those based on open banking and cryptocurrency too,” says Corbett.