Vodafone and Digital Virgo, a global specialist in distribution, payments and monetisation strategies, announced a partnership to help enterprises, other operators, media companies and content creators deliver secure, seamless and trusted digital experiences to consumers in Europe and Africa.
The two companies will work together to accelerate adoption of standardised Open Gateway Network APIs across established mobile payment and carrier billing systems. By integrating operator-grade identity, authentication and fraud prevention capabilities into these systems, third-party providers can make smartphone payments more trusted, reduce friction and support new revenue opportunities.
Under the agreement, Digital Virgo will integrate Vodafone Network APIs into its monetization solutions, serving 300+ merchants and over 150 operators while also making these capabilities available to other organizations. Initially, the partnership covers five markets, including Germany, Greece, Spain, South Africa and the UK, with plans to extend it to more countries.
The combination of Digital Virgo’s operations in more than 60 countries and Vodafone’s global network reach and leading role in developing new standardized APIs will help make trusted telecom network capabilities more accessible. It also reinforces growing industry support for the GSMA Open Gateway initiative and international CAMARA-based standards, which create a common framework for developers and enterprises to securely access network features through consistent, scalable interfaces.
As digital commerce continues to grow, businesses need to improve security while improving the customer experience. Traditional authentication mechanisms can create extra steps, causing more customers to abandon the process and expose gaps for fraudsters. To this end, Vodafone and Digital Virgo will focus on two key areas to help organisations reduce friction across digital journeys, improve conversion rates, strengthen customer trust and minimise exposure to increasingly sophisticated fraud threats. These include:
Replacing SMS One-Time Password (OTP) journeys with Number Verify to create faster, lower-friction and user-friendly authentication.
Combining Open Gateway APIs (Know Your Customer Match and SIM Swap among others) to strengthen onboarding (scoring included), account protection and fraud controls for merchants and digital service providers.
