Today’s consumers demand flexible, on-demand services and pricing that fit their needs. However, many companies are struggling to keep up with consumer demands.
Why? Because they rely on legacy ERP systems that aren’t built for modern, customer-centric digital business models.
These systems weren’t designed to handle dynamic pricing strategies, seamless global transactions, and real-time data analysis. They are good at what they do, but they’re unfit for today’s business landscape, creating bottlenecks that hinder growth and profitability.
Because of these fundamental changes to the overall buying process, companies must rethink their pricing and go-to-market approach. This involves implementing the right tools, and a  dynamic, future-proof monetization platform is part of this modern toolkit. In other words, in order to keep up with the needs of the modern consumer, they need to start a monetization platform implementation.
This article explains why the time to start this project is not tomorrow, next week, or next quarter—it’s right now.
Implementing a monetization platform is a quick and successful way to access innovative billing capabilities​
When companies want to realize new customer-centric business models, they have to think about how they can automate the associated order-to-cash processes and support their customer lifecycle in a successful way. Since the time factor plays a major role in the introduction of new digital business models and the monetization process itself is highly complex, it makes little sense to develop your own system or expand the existing one, as this can take years.
Instead, it is much smarter to implement a monetization platform into the existing IT infrastructure. This is a fast and clever way to gain momentum and enhance legacy IT systems with innovative billing and monetization capabilities required for these new subscription and pay-per-use business models.
When implemented correctly, monetization platforms have a transformative impact on businesses, as demonstrated by the case studies below.
Learn more about Nitrobox's Monetization Platform
Platform Overview
Learn how to scale your order-to-cash and monetization efforts with unlimited recurring, pay-per-use, or transactional models.
Solutions Overview
Explore how Nitrobox can help your business grow faster and more efficiently and bring any digital business model to market.Â
Case Study 1: Launching an international energy and electric charging business model
Read the study here: Electric Charging Case Study
A leading international automotive company wanted to roll out smart energy and electric charging solutions across 30 countries, supporting 24 languages and four distinct brands.
They needed to efficiently manage their diverse service offerings and complex data-driven ecosystem internationally. This required implementing a flexible, scalable, and intelligent billing solution.
They realized if they wanted to keep pace with their growing business, they needed a monetization solution that could automate and manage this new service offering on an international scale and fit perfectly into the existing IT infrastructure. They implemented Nitrobox’s monetization platform and managed a quick launch within 8 weeks and further roll-out to 30 countries with 24 languages within 6 months.
They were able to seamlessly process one-time charges, subscriptions, and transactional fees concurrently on a unified platform. What’s more, they could effectively address international considerations such as each market’s language, currency, and product portfolio variations. What makes this important is that they enabled themselves to adapt to modern buying preferences and set themselves up to do so for the foreseeable future.
In summary, implementing Nitrobox’s monetization platform allowed the automotive company to effectively manage global operations, optimize revenue streams, and swiftly adapt to market demands.
Case study 2: Automated billing for a fast-growing healthcare start-up
Read the study here: Oviva case study
Healthtech startup Oviva was grappling with a good problem to have: rapid growth. While a net positive for the business, this presented significant challenges in the order to cash process, especially when handling complex, time-consuming invoicing for patients and health insurance providers.
They traditionally relied on manual billing processes, like many scaling startups. However, this approach resulted in a backlog of 4,000 invoices over a few months, hindering their ability to scale, optimize cash flow, and provide a high quality of service to their users.
To address these issues, Oviva implemented Nitrobox’s monetization platform. This project kickstarted a drastic transformation.
Oviva:
- completely revamped their billing system within just eight weeks
- reduced the time spent on invoicing from 1.5 weeks per month to just one day.
- Decreased their cost per invoice by 78%
By eliminating manual checks and reducing human errors through thoughtful automation and process optimization, Oviva efficiently cleared its invoice backlog, improved the cashflow and positioned itself for expansion into new markets like Switzerland and France.
The risks of not starting a monetization project
Before going into detail, the risks of delaying a monetization project are substantial—avoid them at all costs. At one time or another, most business will experience one of the problems below if steps are not taken to mitigate them. Monetization platforms are not and will never be a magic bullet, but implementing one will go a long way to turning challenges faced by all businesses into a strength that can be capitalized on.
- Inflexibility: The global business landscape is constantly evolving. Your business will struggle to keep up with an out-of-date billing system. It will lack the flexibility to thrive on upturns, cope with downturns, and meet the ever-changing demands of customers.
- Missed customer opportunities: Today’s customers expect engaging and flexible experiences, whether selecting their billing model or payment method wherever they are or travel to. Using legacy billing systems prevent your company from offering this level of flexibility. This may lead customers to do business with your competitors.
- Scaling difficulties: Scaling a business requires a smart subledger solution that allow them to manage increasing volumes of data. Traditional ERP systems struggle to do this, or to support digital business models at all. Relying on outdated technology and manual processes hinders innovation and effective scaling, limiting your growth potential and market opportunities.
- Losing market share: Failing to innovate allows competitors to gain an advantage. For example, a competitor might capture your market share by implementing a popular usage-based pricing model, or by allowing customers to pay their invoices via installments, or with their desired payment method. Not offering the correct payment methods in a market is a very easy way to churn many loyal customers or prevent new customer acquisitions. According to GoCardless1, 67% of consumers will abandon an e-commerce purchase if their preferred payment method isn’t available.
- Loss of cash flow: Inefficient billing systems disrupt cash flow and increase the burden on your accounts receivables (AR) teams. Outdated processes lead to invoice backlogs, errors, and incorrect billings, impacting your financial stability.
Take immediate action to mitigate these risks and position your business for long-term success. Unlock a host of benefits that will turn your company into a genuine world-beater.
The core benefits of a monetization platform
Implementing a monetization platform directly targets the risks presented above, generating increased productivity, performance, and profitability. Below, we examine each benefit in closer detail:
- Flexibility: Implementing an agile monetization platform enables businesses to swiftly alter their digital business modes and billing processes in response to market changes. This could be configuring a new pricing plan or adding a new payment method that is favored in a particular market. This boosts success, improves resilience during economic downturns and facilitates speedy product launches.For example, Nitrobox provides maximum freedom for monetizing new digital business models. It helps you manage, automate, and scale your business transactions in one smart platform offering all order-to-cash capabilities from contract management, billing and invoicing, and revenue recognition to payments and dunning.
- Capitalize on opportunities: With a comprehensive monetization platform, businesses can support complex digital business models with flexible monetization strategies.They can quickly introduce new products or billing models to meet evolving customer needs. Stay ahead of the curve with the Nitrobox Platform and maximize your business’s revenue potential.
- Scalability: Future-proof monetization platforms offer growing businesses with valuable scalability. For example, Nitrobox allows businesses to handle millions of transactions effortlessly, currency and market agnostic. Its cloud architecture and API-first approach integrates seamlessly into any organization, eliminating constraints imposed by outdated technology.
- Gain market share: It’s obvious that maintaining and expanding market share is crucial. A modern billing system, supported by a monetization project, empowers businesses to rapidly roll out new services globally and expand their catalog of offerings.This rapid rollout allows businesses to outpace competitors, capture market share, and establish themselves as industry leaders. Further, it enables experimentation to rapidly iterate on business models, pricing models, payment methods, and more, so that it is possible to optimize your offerings by market faster than ever.
- Ensure consistent cash flow: The right monetization platform mitigates risks associated with inefficient billing systems and ensures financial stability. For example, Nitrobox’s platform can reduce the time to first revenue by up to 10x (review the Nitrobox platform benefits more here).Businesses will eliminate problems like invoice backlogs and mitigate human error that impacts cash flow by automating order-to-cash processes with a monetization solution. Often, accounting teams aren’t error-prone, but keeping up with the volume of invoices associated with scaling businesses certainly will cause the occasional mistake to slip through the cracks, and at a large enough scale, that becomes incredibly problematic.
- Future-proof your business: Monetization platforms like Nitrobox are future-proof. They enable quick adoption to regulatory changes and new customer requirements and seamlessly integrate with your existing IT infrastructure using the latest APIs, high-performance technologies, and microservices architecture. This always keeps you one step ahead.
It’s time to start your monetization platform implementation
The digital business landscape is evolving at breakneck speed, and it’s impossible to keep up without a clear vision of what is needed for the future.
Whether you want to launch new business models, scale internationally, protect your bottom line, or enhance customer loyalty, one thing’s for certain: you need an agile monetization platform.
Don’t waste time and resources building your own billing system. Instead, implement Nitrobox to get set up with minimal hassle. Schedule a Nitrobox demo to see the full scope of our product features and learn how Nitrobox can be your growth partner today and tomorrow.
Sources:
1: https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/posts/understand-customer-buying-behavior/
