By Moshe Peterfreund, Director of Marketing, FTS
May 11, 2015
In the last few years, the BSS landscape has undergone dramatic changes. With the growth in content, apps, the cloud, e-commerce, m-commerce, video and the Internet of Things (IoT) – in other words, the growth in digital – BSS now needs to support and manage a vast network of interconnected partners and relationships.
For today’s communications, content and payment service providers, the proliferation of digital content and transactions presents a unique set of new challenges as they begin to evolve towards being digital service providers. They need to be able to support the launch of innovative services and ensure smooth integration with multiple new partners in complex value chains; they face declining revenues from traditional services; they must adapt to new and non-familiar business models; they need to invest in new higher-growth services areas; and they must deal with new competitors.
The solution to these challenges lies in creating or supporting new business models and new relationships with new partners, which are increasingly interlinked and ever more complex. And with new partners come different requirements for revenue sharing models – and this is where smart revenue sharing comes in.
In an environment increasingly dominated by digital transactions, service providers’ partners require dynamic and flexible contracts so they can keep up with the demand from fast-growing sectors. However each sector, whether it is traditional telecoms billing, MVNOs and MVNEs, payments, mobile money, video and content services, or M2M and IoT, has its own set of rules, its own business logic and its own way of doing business.
In the telecoms world, service providers can manage and monetize content and digital services through policy control, creating revenue sharing models that involve the customer on one side and OTT providers on the other. Mobile virtual networks operators (MVNOs) and enablers (MVNEs), on the other hand, need to be able to offer innovative branded telecom services through real-time promotions and pricing plans, loyalty programs, and more, supported by totally different partnership schemes.
For payments, the related billing and settlement transactions require the involvement of multiple partners with complex revenue sharing requirements. Mobile money demands operators have a set of comprehensive tools in place that support any payment or banking process over the mobile network in real time, at any time, thus ensuring the provision of mobile financial services including microloans, money transfers, utility bills and more.
Finally, when it comes to M2M billing and IoT, service providers need to be able to offer new deals, services and pricing models which are agile enough to support various business models of many different industry verticals, be it telematics, industrial, retail or utilities, quickly and easily to keep pace with this fast-growing sector.
From this, it’s clear that the evolving service provider must be agile enough to launch new marketing plans and services and process end user changes as quickly as its marketing department can dream them up. Launching new services turns a service provider’s back office into a genuine revenue generator.
However it’s not just about enabling relationships solely between the service provider and the end users, but also the enabling of relationships between all the partners in the entire ecosystem by onboarding new partners with a dedicated contract which can also be easily modified.
In addition, all the relationships between partners and users must be personalized to meet the increasing sophistication of the new industries, regardless of whether they are subscribers, OTT providers, content aggregators, mobile money and payment service providers, utilities or banks.
By implementing smart revenue sharing in this way, a service provider will increase its attractiveness to the entire ecosystem, with the benefits being personalized contracts and relationships with each and every one of the partners in its ecosystem; improved business relationships; reduced total cost of ownership; fast time-to-market and ultimately, increased revenues.
Moshe Peterfreund is a Marketing Director at FTS. FTS works with telecommunications, content and payment service providers globally to help them manage complex transactions and relationships with greater flexibility and greater independence.