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How can you get future business value from your Legacy Prepaid System?

Prepaid Mobile 27th - 30th September 2004

Budapest

David Collins, EMEA Business Development MangerLogicaCMG Mobile Payments

David.A.Collins@LogicaCMG.com

   

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Presentation Content

• Ask the question “How can you get future business value from your Legacy Prepaid System?”

• Ask the question “Where best should you invest?”

• Show how to maximise Prepaid services functionality, flexibility and cost-effectiveness through appropriate investment in your Prepaid Systems

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What will your Prepaid System need to deliver?

• Loyalty programmes, revenue assurance, cross service bundles/promotions, real-time bonuses, recharge options, new undefined, Hybrid accounts, greater rating flexibility, charging intelligence, customer care, subscriber convergence, ……

• Lots of great ideas and examples from today but can your Prepaid system deliver these?

• Furthermore, if you have a strategic objective to converge prepaid and post-paid subscribers into a single environment how can you ensure important characteristics will be retained?

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Continued Prepaid Investment

• Can you say with confidence your Prepaid system is able to meet all marketing requirements today and in the foreseeable future?

• New ideas will appear that we are not aware of today. Vendors need to exploit these as one way to stay in business. E.g. PoC/PTT

• Reality, unlikely anyone can completely predict where the mobile market will take Prepaid Services

• Continued investment in your new or existing system is a likely requirement …..but how best is the investment targeted?

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Business Goal Driven Investment

• Offer best value for money

• Offer best services for your market

• Offer best customer experience

• Make your customers feel wanted

• Reduce running costs

• Improve usability of services

• Offer new services to sustain competitive edge in your market

• Improve knowledge

• Reduce churn

Prepaid Systems play an active role in all of these

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How best should you invest?

• Every operator differs…

• Most operators have been evolving their Prepaid systems for some time….

• “Rip and replacement” is deemed less preferrable by many….

• Vendors starting to offer standard interfaces.

• The continuance of an evolutionary approach can make better business sense

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Case study – Evolutionary Approach

• Operator objectives

– Provide new services to prepaid customers

– Adopt a staged migration to a real-time capable charging architecture

– Provide a controlled migration path to converged services

– “Open-up” the Prepaid System to offer greater vendor choice

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First, a typical Prepaid Service

Call Flow

Network Interface

Call/Service Control

Voice/Data Network

Rating, Charging, Balance Management,

Loyalty

Subs

IVR

3 - Voice Service

2 - Payments Service

Prepaid Service

1 - Data/Content Service

Applications

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1 – Evolving the Data/Content Service

• Migration to a real-time (pre-delivery) charging and control all Data and Content services, particularly high value

– Plug the gaps (e.g. VAS Roaming)

– Guarentee Revenue Assurance

– New capabilities (e.g. support notification of charge)

• Adopt international standards (e.g. OSA/Parlay and IETF DIAMETER)

• Support converged on-line or off-line charging of all services dependant upon service, subscriber type or balance level.

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SMSC

MMSC

GSN

ContentServer

Prepaid

BillingSystems

MSC

BillingService ControlNetwork

1 – Evolving the Data/Content Service

Real-timeData Rating

& Charging Gateway

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1 – Evolving the Data/Content Service

• ARPU Boost

–Offer all services to all types of customers

–Accurate charging and refunding for all services

• OPEX Savings

–Eliminate “hot-billing” revenue leakage/fraud

–Rationalise network and service layer systems

–Reduce volume of call centre calls

• CAPEX Savings

–Supports evolution of legacy systems

–Evolution path to support new network elements and more open architecture

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2 – Evolving the Payments Service

• 2a – Loyalty & Promotions

• 2b – Rating & Charging

• 2c – Balance Management

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2a – Evolving Loyalty & Promotions

• Much of what has been heard earlier today

• Basic promotions and notifications

• Periodic awards

• Recharge rewards

• Profiled Groups

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SMSC

MMSC

GSN

ContentServer

Prepaid

BillingSystems

MSC

BillingService ControlNetwork

2a – Evolving Loyalty & Promotions

Real-timeData Rating

& Charging Gateway

LoyaltyServer

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2b – Evolving Rating & Charging

• Customer selectable Tariff Plans

• Consolidation of Prepaid & Post-paid rating

– Off-board, Prepaid hosted, post-paid hosted typically dependant upon customer base profile

• Convergence through real-time rating router

– Real-time decision whether to process later

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2c – Evolving Balance Management

• Post pay script for family accounts “monthly top-up” from Father to Son then Pay as you Go

• Credit-limited postpay, Group Accounts (e.g. bundled SMS

• Concurrency across services

– Need to move accounts off the IN

• Sophisticated sub account usage

– Service allowance

– Visa account

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2c – Evolving Voice Services

• Existing monolithic systems limit service flexibility and operator choice

• Move away from proprietory voice service logic (Call-flow) to open systems based on Parlay/JAIN

• Introduction existing “off the shelf” voice based services

– E.g. IVR service

• Also, new applications such as Conferencing solutions

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SMSC

MMSC

GSN

ContentServer

Rating Engine

DataSCP

VoiceSCP

ExternalBilling System

MSC

BillingCharging ControlService ControlNetwork

Resultant Payments System

Sub-accounts for bundles and/or main accounts

(optional)

Rating Engine(optional)

Intelligent Charging

Pre-paid balancemanagement

Rating & chargingpolicy engine

Loyalty Server (optional)

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Summary

• Unlikely we can completely predict where the mobile market will take Prepaid Systems

• Opening up the Prepaid Systems through standards is key

– Maximise vendor choice – best of breed, break the “lock-in”

– Introducing competition and drive down costs

– Unlock network potential

• No need to take the risk of replacement

• LogicaCMG is committed to supporting this approach.

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Thankyou!