Fortumo platform is available to everyone. Typical on-boarding process starts with opening an account, configuring your payment services and performing technical integration. Once it’s done, service testing and approval shall follow. Please also make sure your service follows compliance requirements. After your services are live, read about how to handle end-user support.
Nothing – there is no setup or monthly fee.
Yes it is, but due to the market regulations we are not able to provide subscription based payments via self-service portal. To activate subscription-based billing send us a short note about your plans and countries you are interested in to bd@fortumo.com.
In most countries there is no difference. If it is regulated by the local law, private person has to declare earned revenue as their income. In Latvia and Lithuania, only registered companies can receive payouts from Fortumo. For VAT registered companies from Estonia, the VAT is also added to the payout.
We are constantly working on expanding our coverage and probably that particular country will be connected in the future. You can also drop us a note at support@fortumo.com so we could prioritize certain countries.
You will receive information regarding your approval from our compliance team within 2 business days. How fast your service can be approved depends on the countries you have chosen and the speed of the carrier approval in those countries. Most of the countries will be approved within 1-2 business days if the information provided is sufficient. For smooth approval process you need to submit your game/website URL (a test account if necessary) and explain briefly how the payment will be used.
In Fortumo’s web interface, all inactive accounts are deleted automatically. Just delete all your active services and do not to use your account anymore.
Your payout will be made by the 15th day of the month if the following conditions are met:
It varies by country, but is on average 2-3 months. You can see the length of the payout cycle for each country from Revenue shares view on your dashboard. For example if the payout cycle is 2 months, the revenue earned in January will be paid out in April (it takes two months to collect the revenue and will be paid out in third month).
You will find that information from your dashboard. You can view your overall performance from your dashboard, under Revenue tab. In addition, “Estimated Next Payouts” shows predicted future payouts according to the payout cycle.
To transfer money to your bank account, we need to know your IBAN (International Bank Account Number) and BIC (Bank Identification Code), also known as the SWIFT address of the bank, for example DABADKKK or HABALV22. Usually it can be found on the website of your bank.
End-users are always billed together with the local tax (VAT, sales-tax, etc.), but such taxes are typically handled by mobile operators. Therefore Fortumo is sharing revenue from the end-user price exclusive from taxes. I.e. the user is billed €10, VAT is €2 and payout percentage is 85%, you as a developer will get [(€10-€2)*0.85] €6.8 to your bank account. All information about revenue shares can be found in your dashboard from Revenue shares view.
Some mobile operators do not have an infrastructure to connect past transactions with refunds and unpaid phone bills. In such cases operators treat uncollected sum as bad debt which is withheld from the payout.
The money may decrease when some messages with status “pending” change to “failed”. It may happen if the operator fails to deliver the billing report or the end-user refuses to pay the bill.
This can be because of mobile operators have either refunded some of your end-users or collected a bad debt (people did not pay their phone bill) or you have calculated the revenue sharing from the end-user price with VAT.
Yes, sometimes end-users ask Fortumo for a refund, for example if the service they tried to purchase did not work correctly or a minor has made the purchase without parent’s consent. In such case we may need to refund the user. The amount for refund will be deducted from your payout together with the refund handling fees.
We are converting the currencies with a commercial exchange rate once a month in correlation to the mobile operators’ settlement cycle. It is done on the first business day of the month of the particular payout.
Fortumo supports wire transfers to bank accounts and payouts through PayPal and Skrill. The following transactions costs apply to each payout:
Fortumo isn’t withholding any taxes from your revenue, but you might be required to pay income tax of your own country, if you are a private individual. VAT from the messages sent is declared by the mobile operators. All the revenue shares and the calculations are without VAT. Since Fortumo as a company registered in EU, 0% VAT is added to all the payments.
You can configure your payout from the Payout Configuration page. Fortumo supports monthly payouts to both, private individuals and companies. The minimum payout is 100 EUR (~110 USD). If you need to make changes in your payout configuration, they need to be done before the end of the current month to be taken into account for next month’s payout.
##### Is it possible to use a higher end-user price? Typically yes, but it depends on a country and mobile operator regulations. Let us know what do you need and we’ll see how we can help you.
There is no limit and each account can have as many services as needed. How to add new countries to my services? You can easily add new countries to your existing services in 1-2 minutes. Following these simple steps:
Please be aware that new countries may go under approval first.
Adult, lotteries, gambling and donation related services are strictly forbidden. Please see the complete list of country specific content restrictions here and general compliance information here.
By default, it’s Latin alphabet. Non-Latin alphabets like Cyrillic or Greek can also be used in some countries, but only if supported by the local carriers. The regulations for reply messages can be found in the Country regulations document.
##### What’s the difference between MO and MT billing? MO and MT billing are the two methods how carriers charge users. With MO-billing (Mobile Originating Billing), the end-user is charged for sending a message, thus the billing status is checked before the request to service back end. With MT-billing (Mobile Terminating Billing) operators charge for the reply-message sent back to the user. In this case, users are billed only when they receive the reply-message. If there are not enough funds on the balance, the reply message is not delivered.
Please notice that “pending” status does not mean the billing is unsuccessful. It means the billing report has not been sent to us yet. Actually, in most cases “pending” status in MO-billing countries already means the “OK” status. Billing will turn failed only when users refuse to pay their mobile bill at the end of month, but this is very rare. So in MO-countries you should also provide service to users with pending billing. Although for MT countries the billing status is usually available instantly, in some cases it can take some time before it changes to either “ok” or “failed”. In some countries delayed billing reports might happen from time to time.
To protect the end-users and avoid service abuse there are set of limits applied. The overview can be found here.
Sometimes operators fail to bill the customer. This may happen for example when the end-user does not have enough balance on the pre-paid card or there was a technical error.
Direct billing means that the payment is done using a data connection and no SMS is sent. Direct request are done to operator without dealing with SMS. PS! Direct billing does not work without a data connection. This means it’s not possible to use direct billing with API.
In case you did not find an answer here, please also make sure to check out Frequently Asked Questions for web payments and Android SDK