Why a monetization platform?
Changing customer behavior and digitization drive new business models
With the megatrend of digitization, new business models gain massive traction. More and more customers are looking for flexible ways to purchase and use products and services. Instead of buying a car or music, people are looking for new ways to use these on-demand and only when needed. These new kinds of business models are often only possible with a monetization platform.
Customer’s new mindset
Digital services, such as Spotify, Uber or Netflix, show how it is done: flexible and on-demand services which are perfectly tailored to the wishes of today’s consumer. They don’t sell products, but continuous services. To gain long-lasting customer relationships these services are based on constant improvement and flexible-pricing models.
All these business models are based on ongoing digitization and a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). It’s predicted that these trends will increase in the future.
The transformation from product to service provider
Many companies have already transformed their businesses and now offer additional services to their customers. While this trend is seen in many business-to-consumer (B2C) industries, one of the strongest growth areas is business-to-business (B2B) models. More and more products are also available as a service. For example: aircraft engines are paid by mileage, drilling equipment by the number of holes drilled or cars by the minutes used. The provider takes the risk of offering a functional service, but gets the advantage of a constant customer relationship and usage data.
The future is individual business models per customerÂ
Purchasing behavior is as individual as people’s ways of living. For merchants, this means a new stage of complexity since there is still a large number of customers looking for traditional ways of buying and owning goods.
At Nitrobox, we believe in mass customized business models – offering the right product to each potential client at the right time. Whether the customer may want to use a product, own it for a certain amount of time or switch between models – merchants need to be able to deal with those challenges.
What is a monetization platform?
A monetization platform is a software built to enable businesses to bring their digital business models such as subscriptions, pay-per-use, tiered, or one-time transacitons to market. A monetization platform offers features that cover the full scope of the order to cash process, covering plan management to payments and dunning. Software solutions like Nitrobox’s webportal are considered monetization platforms due to their scope of features.Â
Where traditional ERP and finance systems struggle
On-demand models require usage information
Since most flexible business models do not include long-running contracts, but the potential to change their ID for every customer, providers need to constantly refine and improve their products. They need tons of usage information:
- Which features are used most or abandoned?
- How do contracts and usage evolve?
- Which prices are customers willing to pay?
- How to differentiate between a good and a bad customer?
- Do I earn money with my services?
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Massive amount of data as a challenge
The amount of data generated by service-orientated business models is a challenge for providers. Billions of microtransactions happen every month when millions of intelligent IoT devices are put to work.
All this usage information needs to be stored, processed and transformed into billing data. Traditional billing and accounting systems are overloaded with the tasks ahead.
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Smart billing and payments
For customers, the flexible on-demand world means convenience and peace of mind – for service providers, it means a high complexity of processes and cases. When it comes to billing and payments, multiple contracts and usages of the customer may need to be combined to one invoice. Discounts may apply if certain thresholds are reached and commissions to marketplace partners may need to be paid out.
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Uncertainty, lean and agile principles
Businesses cannot predict the future. Therefore they need to implement procedures and technology that enables fast adaption to changes in the consumer environment. Most traditional systems are built with efficiency and standardization in mind. In a world of uncertainty, agility becomes more important than ever and requires systems that can change direction within days or minutes, and not years.
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Agile monetization platform as a solution
All the necessary capabilities in one place
To overcome all these challenges, we created a single-cloud platform combining capabilities out of different domains, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and billing, accounting and payments management.
The Nitrobox technology combines all functions within one central platform. It can be easily connected via latest APIs, providing a SaaS-solution that is adaptable to existing financial systems and providers. Designed for monetizing complex digital business models, accounting processes and booking rules are adaptable and changeable according to individual needs. After finishing the booking procedure, the subledger will be integrated into the general ledger.
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An enterprise-ready cloud platform
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Serving markets worldwide
With every region and country a business moves to, it faces new requirements when it comes to billing, accounting, payments and compliance. Enterprises and finance officials face a multitude of challenges.
Build for fast-growing companies, the Nitrobox order to cash platform was designed to help enterprises deal with the challenges of internationalization. Nitrobox technology combines all the necessary capabilities to monetize any business model anywhere within one central platform. Extreme flexibility in processes, business rules and templates enables fast roll-outs to countries worldwide.
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