BIMS Daily Digest – Conference Day Two !
Hello from Amsterdam and Conference Day Two of BIMS 2008!
Delegates were again kept entertained and informed by a series of cutting edge presentations, case studies and discussion sessions.
The day kicked off with a keynote presentation by Microsoft’s very own visionary on platforms and architectures. Eric Troup, Platform Strategy Advisor, Microsoft’s Telecoms Business Unit outlined their strategy for delivering innovative, service centric delivery platforms. Over the years Microsoft has been working in all sectors of the telecoms market from network elements and servers to handsets and including delivery platforms. Troup outlined what future eco-systems may look like where content and services from multiple sources can be accessed and bundled in real time for delivery to consumers.
Mauricio Najarro, Programme Manager at AT&T although unable to attend in person gave his presentation via telephone link. His session ‘Outlining the billing and customer care implications of becoming a fully integrated communications service provider’ focused on his work managing projects at AT&T. Najarro’s experience gave delegates a detailed outline of the issues and challenges that an operator will face during any transformation project. Particular emphasis was placed on the management of third party relationships and how important a partnership model is to achieve major change.
The executive interview panel with BT’s Jonathan Jensen and Swisscom’s Joost Eringfield focused on the effect on customers from transformational change in billing and customer care. Interviewer, Tony Poulos asked if transformation had increased customer care requirements and had affected customers adversely. Both interviewees admitted an initial increase in customer enquiries but with introduction of simpler bills they were expecting to minimise the number of calls. Both confirmed that no transformation of the network elements can be achieved without transforming the BSS layer as well. Transformation and optimisation of the network demands the same of the existing BSS. Both companies were actively trying to reduce the number of billing systems in this rationalisation process which would inevitably lead to lower cost structures and improved efficiencies.
After the morning coffee break the conference split in to two streams. Chaired by TailorMade Consulting’s Jesper Larsen, Stream A provided two contrasting visions for network operator business models of the future.
First, Charmaine Oak of Orange UK gave a comprehensive account of the new services that billing systems will have to support: content, social networking, user-generated content, location-based services, near-field communication services, payment services and more. For each of these services, we need to allow for conventional subscription and usage charges, perhaps ad-supported or third-party sponsored or all-you-can eat packages. Combine all of these in various segment-targeted bundles, add the need for identity and authentication, and you have a big, complicated challenge. Clearly this is a challenge that operators and their vendors are gearing up to meet.
All of this, though, is predicated on a view of the future that could fairly be described as the mainstream network operator’s perspective of the future: a future in which the carrier is still at the centre of the customers’ universe, and in which all content and services are provided by the operator itself, or by the operator’s partners.
Henk Ensing of the Netherland’s TNO (a government-initiated research and consulting group) provided a somewhat different perspective. Ensing summarised the evolution of billing approaches: from network-centred to services-centred, and (soon) to customer-centred in which multiple parties cooperate in the delivery of a rich variety of on-line products. Ensing envisages a future in which all charging (he avoids the word “billing”) is dynamic. Charging options are limited to “pay now” or “charge my pre-paid account”. There’s no room for traditional post-pay and complex price-plans in this dynamic world in which “each transaction is unique”. Supporting all this is a SOA-based billing environment that separates the billing process (or business logic) from the billing functions. In Ensing’s world systems will evolve to enable cooperation with multiple partners, where “no single company owns every link in the value chain”.
In the afternoon session, Marcel Olieman of Base provided detailed descriptions of strategies for margin optimisation in the areas of voice interconnect, numbering and number portability, routing optimisation (cost/quality tradeoffs), and wholesale charging. In closing, Marcel underlined the value of a properly implemented and managed billing system in managing both financial and traffic flows. This was a thorough analysis of margin improvement opportunities aimed squarely at network service provider billing specialists.
The final presentation in the Supporting New Business Models stream was by Hans Hodes of KPN. He described KPN’s introduction of VoIP services, starting in 2005, and the tensions that emerged in trying to fit the new technology into KPN’s billing, collections and revenue assurance environment. Hodes gave an account of how KPN met the challenge and provided his perspective on the valuable lessons learned and experience acquired in the areas of process management, IT implementation, project management and product definition. The key messages: the need for a customer-centric approach rather than a product-oriented approach; the need to avoid complexity in both systems and products; that lasagne works better than spaghetti…
On the one hand delegates were learning how to generate potential revenue streams from new business models, on the other, they were learning to how to guarantee and protect those revenues. Revenue leakage, Fraud, Bad Debt, are terms we have all lived with now for years. And it looks very likely that they will remain with us for many more years to come. This conference track featured some success stories in the battle to claim every bit of the revenue due to the operator, but it is clear that this is an on-going battle.
Chaired by Marc Trautsolt of Alcatel-Lucent, the Revenue, Cost & Financial Assurance stream began with a case study from Bareah Shankiti of Zain (Kuwait). She provided a very detailed and cogent explanation of how the Revenue Assurance and Fraud Management programmes are designed and managed within Zain. With loads of practical advice, Ms. Shankiti talked about the importance of establishing support through some quick wins that deliver real money back to the bottom line. With the resulting executive support, you can then move to map the processes, identify likely areas where more revenue is lurking and put in place the automated tools to police these processes. When anomalies are found, don’t just report on them – go around and fix the problem.
Perhaps most importantly, Zain has tightly connected the Revenue Assurance programme to their new service launch programme. This rather novel approach enables the RA team to work from the initial concept stage with the Marketing group to identify the likely areas of risk. The service description can either be modified (easily at this early stage) to minimize risk, or the RA programme can be tuned and ready to manage the new service when launched. Cross company collaboration was in fact a critical success factor for the Zain team. By working closely with each department, the RA team is able to benefit from each group’s expertise, improve its controls and business rules and deliver better results with each iteration.
Important lessons learned were provided by the other presenters in this track too: Samie Ahmed Kazi of Omantel; Scheherazadé Bokhari of T-Mobile UK, and Steve McGonagle of BT. In examining some of the new problems that can arise when delivering new services provided by content partners, Mr. Kazi reinforced the importance of testing the end-to-end process of ordering, provisioning and billing – thoroughly – before launching any new service. Other great advice included having every group involved in User Acceptance Testing. For example, make sure that Finance, Accounting and Marketing all have a chance to test the system for the results they expect, in addition to the usual “users” Network Operations, Customer Service and Billing
More good advice included:
- Monitor your content partners closely to ensure that they don’t “spam” the system, generating lots of transactions to make it appear that the service is more successful than it actually is.
- Test each process from end-to-end and from many different expert perspectives to stop leaks before they start.
And the bottom line? Always look in your suspense bucket!
More from us tomorrow, but for now a big thank you to my team of roving reporters!
Tony Poulos, AsiaPac Representative, TM Forum
Barbara Lancaster, President, LTC International
Trevor Hayes, Strategic Specialist, LTC International
With warm regards from Amsterdam,
Mindy Emsley
Conference Producer
IIR Telecoms
memsley@iir-conferences.com
| BIMS Media Partner Insights: The Mobile Explosion: Mobile Phones And Money Transfer |
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During the past few years, the use of mobile telephony in Africa has soared and one of the fastest growing areas of mobile phone use is money transfers. David Seddon reports Half the world’s 6.5 billion people use a mobile phone and there are more than twice as many mobile phone owners in developing countries as in developed countries. Subscriber growth rates in developing countries are 25 per cent a year – and double that in Africa. In 1990, there were only 14,200 mobile phones in Africa (out of a global total of 11 million); by 2006, the number was more than 130 million out of a world total of 2.2 billion. The number of mobile phone users in Africa increased tenfold in the years from 1999 to 2004 alone, from 7.5 million to 85 million people, and has virtually doubled in the past two years. This growth has been largely driven by private enterprise. Mobile telephony is big business and has huge appeal for the major players in the telecommunications industry. The mobile telephone is being used for a wide variety of purposes. Increasingly the mobiles are being used to promote entrepreneurship and economic activity by widening access to markets, compensating for poor or non-existent transport networks, facilitating supervision of the production process, providing financial services and aiding the transfer of funds from place to place. Information is vital to trade, and increasingly, in Africa, small-scale traders and businessmen are making use of mobile phones. Of major and rapidly growing significance is the use of mobile phones for financial services. In Uganda, MTN has introduced the VillagePhone programme, which replicates a similar programme run by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. It is offered in cooperation with microfinance institutions, which provide credit to their clients who then set up as village entrepreneurs, selling ‘time’ for the local use of mobiles. There are now more than 4000 such operators (many of them women) in 56 districts. Unophone Uganda is another operation that promotes phone-based enterprises in rural areas. Unophone has more than 1500 operators in 25 districts and aspires eventually to reach every one of Uganda’s 27,000 villages. One of the fastest growing areas in which mobiles are used is that of international money transfers. In a recent paper to the UN, published in 2006, Nana Ama argued that, in order to facilitate remittance sending, and more generally the transfer of funds to developing countries, “banking technology should not be limited to the use of ATMs but could extend to the use of payment terminals, wireless internet transfers and mobile telephony. These relatively simple technologies will enable individuals and communities with limited or no access to banking facilities to have electronic access to funds to pay for goods and services, establish a credit history and have access to credit”. Increasing numbers of African migrant workers and immigrant (or diaspora) communities living and working abroad, elsewhere in Africa or in Europe, the US and the Middle East, are sending money home to their relatives and local communities. The value of these remittances is enormous: the global value of remittances sent to developing countries as a whole is estimated at around $170 billion and the proportion of that sent to Africa, although still relatively small is, nevertheless, in absolute terms very large. Major recipients are Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa, but most African countries now receive a significant volume of remittances, often exceeding the value of total exports, foreign direct investment and other major sources of foreign exchange. Nigeria receives around 60 per cent of officially recorded remittances to sub-Saharan Africa and about 2 per cent of global flows. In 2004, that meant some $2.3 million. While much of the money transfer business remains in the hands of banks, the postal services and, even more importantly, the high street money transfer operators (MTOs), increasing use is being made of pre-paid cards and mobile phones. There is every reason to believe that the future for money transfer systems, which increasingly will reduce the need for intermediaries, lies with mobile or cell phones. Mobile phones can easily carry the near field communications (NFC) devices already used in smart cards. As NFC devices can cost only a few cents, they could be inserted into every mobile phone. Then instead of carrying plastic for various purposes, only the phone will be required. The explosion in the use of mobile phones in Africa during the first years of the 21st century is likely to be matched by an explosion in the use of mobile phones to make payments and to effect money transfers. While it is unlikely that the existing intermediaries, the banks, the postal services and the money transfer operators will be thrown out of business, it is certain that they will lose a major chunk of their market and that competition to provide customers with services will increase even further. This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the December/January 2008 edition of International Payments. www.informafinance.com/ip
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BIMS Media Partner Insights: Global Market For Telecoms Retail Billing Set To Grow |
| Contacts |
Conference Programme: Mindy Emsley, Conference Producer, IIR Telecoms & Technology at memsley@iir-conferences.com For details of sponsorship and exhibition opportunities, contact Stephan Groves, Business Development Manager at sgroves@iir-conferences or Russell Bacon, Business Development Manager at rbacon@iir-conferences.com |
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