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Part Three: Tailored Billing for the New Business Model Whatever the business model, one of the most essential parts of the business is the ability to rate and charge service usage. Another crucial factor is the subscriber base management. These do not only affect the branding policy; they are also significant when it comes to operational cost-efficiency. Regarding its billing capabilities, FastForward has two options: either to rent billing capacity from the Network Operator or to buy its own billing system. In both cases, a proper billing system would enable the Network or Virtual Operator to rent billing capacity to other Service Providers and thus get additional revenues. There are some specific requirements: First, to reduce operational costs, one billing system should be able to serve several players; it should provide scalability to serve several Service Providers and millions of subscribers. It should also provide versatile functionality and easy management to keep maintenance costs low for the host operator and to allow ease-of-use for Service Providers that are renting the capacity. Second, to gain a competitive advantage, the Service Providers that are renting the billing capacity should be able to maintain their own brands and independence, including their own tariffs, subscriptions, services, contents of announcements or notifications, and business rules without interference from others. Independent login access to the transaction management system for each Service Provider is vital. The Service Providers would have access only to a portion of the database and the reports that apply to them. No other Service Provider, not even the host operator would have access to the subscriber base and billing information. Third, to ensure that operations are secure and to avoid revenue leakage the billing system should be able to perform in real time and on fault-tolerant computing platform. The more subscribers a single system can handle in real time without loss in performance, the better is the return on investment. Moreover, the better the quality of service the subscribers get, the more they are likely to spend. Finally, the billing system should be convergent and able to rate and charge all types of services, from traditional voice and SMS to m-commerce and WiFi. At the end of the day, those operators and service providers that manage to reach a good margin, for example by keeping costs low and maximising service usage, are the winners, no matter what business model they choose.
CBOSS is an exhibitor at
Billing Systems 2005, running consecutively for over 12 years this prestigious
event is well recognised as the largest and most important billing, CRM &
revenue management date in the calendar.
Billing Systems exhibition and conference takes place in . . The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of MobileIN.com. You are encouraged to seek the advice of health professional concerning these matters of great importance.
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