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Emerging Markets Reap
Benefits of Real-Time Billing
By Denis
Gathanju
As mobile phone operators in emerging markets continue to generate
revenue, billing and OSS
solution providers have had success working with them. Billing is now a
dynamic force with strategic implications and major repercussions for
operators worldwide. Operators and subscribers alike in emerging
markets are among those enjoying the powerful benefits of real-time
billing in particular.
According to Haim Kantor, associate vice president of the real-time
billing division of Comverse, the development of next-generation
billing can be attributed to several factors. First, in the current age
of instant gratification subscribers are attracted to the availability
of new data services that offer instant information, instant
entertainment, instant communication, and instant purchases. To
complete the circle, notes Haim, subscrib ers need to know
instantaneously the status of their account and the cost of such
services features that real-time billing provides.
As operators around the world and especially in the emerging markets
are seeking ways to lower the risk of bad debt among subscribers,
real-time billing is in some respect a savior. It already serves as the
foundation of prepaid billing, which is the dominant mode of payment
for many operators in emerging markets. Given the opportunity to
introduce advanced services without the risk of post-paid models,
emerging markets no longer lag behind but have instead leapt forward to
reach a level at par with the developed world.
Real-Time
Suits Asian Market Growth
Real-time billing has thus put emerging markets on the map. One area
that has benefited is Asia-Pacific, which is ideally suited for these
next-generation systems due to the popularity of prepaid services
there. Most mobile subscribers in the regio n are said to be prepaid,
sometimes reaching up to 95 per cent of an operator’s entire
customer base. And with the prepaid market growing rapidly in the
region, real-time billing systems, which are most suited for supporting
this growth, are likely to become an even more integral part of the
industry. “The adoption of new billing systems has, in fact,
enabled nations such as Indonesia,
India and Malaysia
to gain a foothold at the forefront of the mobile phone world,”
Haim notes.
For instance, Mobile-8 Telecom, a new operator in the fiercely
competitive Indonesian market, required a secure real-time billing
capability. It required integrated control and support of both its
prepaid and postpaid subscriber operations. The company deployed an
end-to-end solution that supports billing for prepaid and postpaid
subscribers, voice and data services, and customer relationship
management (CRM), while enabling all service requests to be authorized
in real-time to all subscriber s.
The real-time billing system allows Mobile-8 to concentrate on its core
business which is to provide top-quality services to its subscribers
regardless of the payment system. And by implementing its real-time
billing solution, together with fully integrated customer care, the
Indonesian telecom firm is well positioned as a new player in the South
East Asian nation’s mobile telephony market.
Emerging
Markets Keep Billing Bullish
According to recent IDC report, the global telecom billing market is
expected to record a steady compound annual growth rate (CAGR) growth
6.7 per cent to hit the $ 6.6 billion mark by 2011."The expected
healthy growth of the billing market over the next several years is
buoyed by the largest service providers' billing transformation
projects," says Shira Levine, senior analyst for Next-Generation
OSS and Billing at IDC. "Service providers of all sizes and in all
regions are recognizing the critical role that billing will play in the
rollout of advanced, revenue-generating services,” she says.
According to the study, the global billing market will continue its
bullish run well after the forecast period in 2011, especially in the
emerging markets where subscriber bases are expected to continue
increasing as compared to the almost saturated markets of North America
and Western Europe. Growth in both
North America and Western Europe billing markets, says the report, is
expected to slow down towards the end of the forecast period as
operators wind down their billing transformation projects.
For instance, the Middle Eastern mobile market presents greater revenue
opportunities than markets in Europe
when taking into account its size and spending power. That’s
according to a new report titled ‘The Middle Eastern mobile
market: trends and forecasts 2007-12’, published by Analysys. In
2006, the report says, total mobile revenue per capita in the Middle
East demonstrated a trend above that of European markets when comparing
those markets within the two regions with similar levels of average
disposable income. For example, in a Middle Eastern market where
disposable income is US$10, 000.00, total mobile revenues would be
expected to be 20 percent higher than an equivalent European market.
“While there is increasing liberalization of the mobile market
across the region, mobile operators in the Middle East have benefited
from the relative lack of competition in both fixed and mobile markets
and have been able to bring in impressive revenues,” says the
report’s author, Daniel Jones. “However, as competition
intensifies across the region, operators will have an increasingly
tough time trying to maintain this premium.”
The report says that total mobile service revenue is forecast to grow
at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of over 10 per cent, from US$22
billion in 2006 to US$39.7 billion by the end of 2012. In many Middle
Easte rn countries, the report adds, service revenue will be boosted by
strong growth in subscribers, outweighing the effect of falling Average
Revenue per User (ARPU), which will accompany subscriber growth in many
maturing markets.
MTN South Africa Uses
StreamServe Document Processing Solution
MTN, one of three major mobile operators in South
Africa, has recently introduced a new document
processing system from StreamServe that will serve its entire network
in South Africa.
The company’s GSM network is one of the largest national networks
in the world, covering a geographical area equal to the size of France and Germany.
The move comes after the South African based mobile telephony giant
decided to move its bill formatting in-house. The company recognized
that would eventually make its invoicing process more flexible, add
functionality and help reduce its overall operating costs.
According to MTN, the system it inherited from an acquired company six
years ago was not optimized for a large mobile phone operator and
hence, MTN needed a change. The billing system was upgraded to include
StreamServe after the acquisition and was mainly use d in-house in a
service provider environment. Later, the mobile phone operator started
to look at how it could use StreamServe in a broader way and upgraded
to a newer version.
MTN processes 900,000 invoices every month for its clients that include
both post-paid and pre-paid telephony. This also includes itemized
bills for approximately 565,000 customers. Additionally, the South
African telecommunications provider processes almost 10,000 e-mails
every month, including data from the operations system that is mainly
taken from one source, the Eppix billing system.
Says Gary Hau, MTN's senior IS billing/customer care manager,
"When we started to use StreamServe on a large scale, we found the
system served us very well. Before we had the entire bill formatting
and e-bill activities outsourced, which wasn't a very flexible solution."
As a result of implementing StreamServe, MTN has realized substantial
cost savings and improved billing functionality in it s day to day
operations. "On top of that, it has given us better control of
bill formatting and bill presentment by allowing us to move it
in-house" says Hau.
According to Mr. Hau, since implementing the StreamServe enterprise
document processing solution, MTN has greatly benefited from the
billing system as it has helped the firm in marketing new products and
enabling business operations. MTN has not yet done a full ROI analysis
of the billing solution, but is convinced that the StreamServe system
has been responsible for considerable cost savings and significant
business advantages.
“Although we haven’t calculated exactly how much money we
save by using StreamServe Telecom, I can safely say that the saving is
substantial,” says Mr. Hau. “On top of that, it has given
us better control of bill formatting and bill presentment by allowing
us to move it in-house.”
Today MTN provides over 13.5 million subscribers with mobile telephony
within its GSM netwo rks. South Africa
is the largest market I Africa with more than eight million
subscribers, but MTN also has operations in Nigeria,
Rwanda, Swaziland, Cameroon
and Uganda.
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