Microsoft Steps Up Carrier Billing With New Partnerships

Carrier billing, in recent days, has been gaining ground as an interesting new mobile payment system, allowing users to route bills through a mobile carrier and pay said bill with the plan’s monthly bill.

Microsoft—who hasn’t exactly been doing great in the mobile device space of late—has recently drawn up new partnerships with Boku and Sprint that will give Microsoft users more access to purchases via the Windows Store.

This isn’t limited to mobile users alone; there’s some provision made here for using this on a desktop as well, though you’ll need a mobile carrier to be able to bill through it.

Sprint subscribers could, at last report, turn to their mobile phone number to make purchases, which allows users to make purchases without having to reveal payment details to anyone but the mobile carrier.

It represents a kind of extremely secure mobile payment service, and though its original intent was said to be to give high population areas without credit card access to a new kind of billing, there’s been a new push on to bring it to more credit card-saturated areas as well.

Apple, for example, is said to offer carrier billing through the German App Store, and several other companies like the U.K.’s Bango, are involved with carrier billing as well for several firms like Amazon and Google.

It’s actually a clever idea; instead of filing payment details with a store that a customer may buy from, the store charges the mobile company, which in turn passes the bill on to the customer. That intermediary step helps provide a note of better security; all of a user’s details are consolidated with an entity that already has it and is actively working to protect it.

It’s actually something of a surprise that it’s not done more often; it seems to be a useful way to offer a mobile payment system that can be used almost anywhere and with a great deal of security.

Carrier billing might well be one of the great new mobile payment systems, if it can get a little farther off the ground. If Microsoft can nail down more of the market in this sector, it may well have the competitive edge it needs to get users out of the Apple and Android camps and give it some more market share.