Sees growth in revenue assurance
Mobile dealers who are scamming the operator better look out, because revenue assurance company cVidya is putting the operators on to their case.
cVidya has launched software for mobile operators that lets them track the performance of their dealers, tallying SIMs shipped with those sold, revenues in, commissions out and so on.
cVidya’s Dealer Management Platform has three elements, commission management, commission verification and fraud management, designed to collect data from all data sources from dealers and SIM and handset activation and usage, to help operators benchmark dealers, either to reward the good dealers or penalise the underperformers. Although the product was launched back in October 2007, the company will be giving it a push at the upcoming Mobile Congress World.
Alon Aginsky, ceo of cVidya said that commission schemes were now so complex there was no way using a normal spreadsheet could keep up with the potential abuses, and mistakes, of the system. He added that when his company, whose bread and butter business is revenue assurance for telecoms operators, looked into the dealer channel, they found 180 actual examples of fraudulent activity – from simply unlocking SIMs and selling subsidized phones at higher prices, to other more complicated mechanisms.
Typically, he said, operators have been over-paying dealers 30% on their actual commissions.
But the platform is not all about giving operators a stick to beat naughty dealers with, Aginsky said. It would also give dealers clarity on what they can actually claim for, he said, as well as allowing operators to reward high performing dealerships.
Aginsky was speaking to Mobile Europe to publicise what he sees as being a major shift in revenue assurance in mature markets in 2008 – the move from identifying revenue leakage to actual revenue reclamation.
Revenue assurance is featuring in many more RFPs, he said. In 2006 cVidya responded to 14 RFPs, in 2007 there were 40 and in January this year the company has already responded to eight. This increased activity is driven by three things, Agonsky said; regulatory compliance, economical arguments and the increasing complexity of new generation services.
“Operators can see that for a relatively small investment they can add $10 million net net to the bottom line, and they know that if they wanted to raise that amount of revenue through a new service the expense to get there and risks would be far greater,” Agonsky said. “Anyone can detect. The key the root cause analysis to identify the source and then fix it at source and reclaim the money immediately.”
One example cVidya provides is in its work with Telecom Italia on a broadband VoIP service, in which it found that nearly 23,000 of TI’s business customers had been wrongly labeled as residential customers, meaning they were being charged a flat rate instead of by the call. More importantly, call data was not being stored in mediation and was never even reaching the billing and rating system, because TI thought it would save money on its mediation requirements by not sending residential call info to mediation, seeing as how they were all flat rate in any case. Identifying this error, which had been caused when DSLAM equipment had been swapped out and the businesses were wrongly configured, generated €18 million for TI in the first eight months of using the product, cVidya says.