Economic crisis or not, operators have always taken great pains to minimize revenue leakage and make sure every scrap of traffic is billed accordingly. But the art of revenue assurance is now undergoing a fundamental shift as networks converge and metrics become more complex. The scope of revenue assurance strategies is widening to include more and more touch points in the network as telcos become increasingly aware of the fact that revenue-assurance isn't as easy as it used to be.
At the heart of this trend is the rapid advancement of next-generation network services over last few years, which is bringing in additional players that are creating an increasingly complex set of new billing and revenue management relationships. Among those already in the market, content aggregators, content providers and advertisers have reshaped the way operators manage their revenue chains, and complicated the revenue-assurance landscape as their respective OSS processes collide with each other, says Brian Lindsay, enabling technologies service provider analyst at Yankee Group.
'Previously, simple discrepancies between an operator's records and other parties in the chain were relatively easy to detect, monitor and resolve largely because of call data record [CDR] reconciliation and switch traffic,' Lindsay wrote in a research note. 'However, with the proliferation of new parties, each supported by their own processes, data which was previously simple to obtain sits potentially on a number of different systems in a number of different organizations, often beyond the reach of any one operator.'
In other words, changes to existing networks and implementations of new systems are creating more potential cracks in the system for revenue leakage and enabling more weak links that can be exploited by fraudsters.
Revenue-sharing content, which contains a number of new processes across multiple service providers, is particularly susceptible to new source of revenue leakage and fraud, says Dr Gadi Solotorevesky, chief scientist of cVidya Networks and TMF Advisory board and RA team leader.
'When you are dealing with revenue-sharing content, operators can find themselves in a situation which they're not collecting money from the customers but they are paying money for the content providers,' says Solotorevesky.
This puts operators at higher risk compared to other service offerings, he noted, partly because of the large volume of content they deliver, and partly because the cost for content transactions is higher than call transactions.
Broader approach
The good news is that operators are becoming increasingly aware of the risk of revenue leakage, especially with IP-based services like VoIP, IPTV and digital marketing poised to create new and potentially lucrative revenue streams. Consequently, many service providers are increasingly placing revenue assurance at the heart of both strategic and system planning to stem potential financial losses from the delivery of these new services.
In fact, says Lindsay of Yankee Group, rather than treating revenue assurance as something to be done after the fact - i.e. identify the leakage and recoup the lost revenue - some telcos, especially those with a reasonably mature RA practice, are now taking a more proactive approach to include revenue-assurance planning at the initial stages of product development, and whenever changes are made to existing products and services.
'This is increasingly about making sure that you can secure future revenue from your products and service before product rollout,' says Lindsay.