FEATURE BILLING
There is also a greater
operational elegance to
convergent billing, attractive
to carriers that, over many
years of operation, have
accumulated a variety of
legacy billing systems and
software solutions
38
The more familiar concept of converged
billing—lumping the invoice for mobile, fixed,
broadband and payTV onto a single bill—is
often touted as a simplicity-enhancing offering
for consumers. There remain questions
as to the validity of this outlook, though. “It’s
going to vary from one market to another,”
says Cerillion’s director of marketing, Dominic
Smith. “I know from surveys with regard to
single bills that, in some markets, they are
perceived to be quite a high risk because
customers will end up getting very large
bills and that could put them off using those
services. In other markets it’s perceived to be
more convenient.”
One argument suggests that cramming
even more information onto the (traditionally)
already unfathomable mobile bill could result
in absolute confusion for the end user. Smith
suggests that converged bills could evolve
to resemble credit card statements, with
the various events, such as a film purchase,
or a mobile content download, listed in a
navigable way.
While there may be benefits to the consumer
from operator shifts to converged billing
environments, carriers’ principal motivations
are a little closer to home, according to Eric
Hatton. “I would argue that the biggest driver
that we’ve seen for convergent systems is cost.
It’s about the operators wanting to reduce
their opex and wanting to get the vendors
under control.”
In a theoretical (and simplified) mobile
operator with a 50/50 split in its subscriber
base between prepaid and postpaid, says
Hatton, the two divisions running the rating
engines for each payment model might employ
an equal number of people. As convergent
billing takes hold, the carrier might shift its
subscriber base so that 80 per cent of customers
are on the real time billing system. It will
make sense to keep some customers—large
spending corporates, perhaps—on the postpaid
model, but this division will then require
a smaller staff. “That’s certainly going to
reduce your cost as all the management and
overhead costs come down.”
There is also a greater operational elegance
to convergent billing, attractive to carriers
that, over many years of operation, have accumulated
a variety of legacy billing systems
and software solutions. It can get confusing.
“Carriers’ billing environments have tended to
morph over the years, with additional bits and
pieces added on here and there,” says Dominic
Smith. “Before we talked about convergent
billing, it was normal for operators to add
new components or add new systems just to
launch a new service. That might have been
okay in the old days but now we’re talking
about large volumes of services.”
This might be a pain in the neck for the
billing specialists, but it’s a fact of life. No
carrier—save a new entrant—has the luxury
of implementing a brand new billing system
across the board. For an established operator,
the expense of a full swap out would simply
be too great. The business case, says Eric
Hatton, simply wouldn’t stand up.
And so the carriers have no option but to
upgrade here and there. Trial a new system
with a fragment of its customer base and, if it
works for a year, spread the new system further
into its operation. Typically, says Smith,
a billing system has a lifecycle of four or five
years and at intervals like this carriers do
make more wholesale changes. But incremental,
generally, is the only way forward.
“When you’re talking about a huge array
of value added services,” Smith continues, “if
operators are in a situation where they have
to add or customise a system every time they
want to launch a new service, then that’s a
nightmare. Particularly as there’s some doubt
these days as to which services are actually
going to generate revenue.”
As a result, the keyword for operators and
vendors when specifying billing systems
and upgrades is ‘flexibility’. A system that
can be adapted to a range of services that
the operator wants—or might at some point
want—to launch is the development goal
of the billing community. But the task, says
Hatton, “is not easy”.
Part of the problem is that carriers don’t
always know exactly what capabilities they
will need going forward because they don’t
always know what services they are going to
launch. “It’s not uncommon for us to receive
very long wish lists of things that carriers
think they might need to support or use in
the future,” says Smith.
Oliver Suard points out that “there are a
lot of features in billing systems that are not
used by operators,” simply because billing
vendors are trying to develop cover-all systems
that don’t get blamed for hindering the
creative progress of product managers and
marketing teams. And billing, historically,
has been a stumbling block because, say
the billing specialists, it has always been
treated as an afterthought. Billing just isn’t
sexy enough. »
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