The telecommunication industry has undergone a tremendous amount of change. From offering basic communication services to people, it has now an array of digital services along with basic voice and SMS service. The B2C or retail segment has seen a surge in telecom partnerships from both telecom and non-telecom domain as the data consumption is increasing multifold. There are content aggregators, content producers, partners from media & entertainment, fitness industry, financial, healthcare and many more. The B2B partnerships are also growing as 5G takes the center stage in the developed regions. Experts estimate around 31 billion IoT connected devices by the end of 2020. There will be more enterprise partners from other industry verticals.
As the number of partners for a telecom operator increases, it becomes more crucial to keep transparency across the partner ecosystem. Doing timely billings and settlements become a difficult task with so many partners to manage. And ensuring an error-free process becomes more challenging given the variety of partners from multi-industry verticals.
What is the Need of the Hour?
For a healthy partnership, the transactions must be accurately managed, rated, and settled. Delays in the settlement process are one of the biggest concerns for Telcos and its partners. Wrong invoices and mismatch of information can lead to disputes, blocked revenue, and inefficient partnerships. Also, manually managing invoices from so many partners to identify discrepancies, raising disputes, and concluding the same can be very heavy on the OPEX.
Partner Assurance for Successful Partnerships
Partner Assurance allows telecom operators to have a transparent partner ecosystem with efficient billing and settlements. Partner Assurance feature of Subex ROC Partner Management solution offers a complete automated process to ingest invoices, reconciling, highlighting discrepancies and automatically raise disputes. It has a template-based ingestion process of invoices directly from emails or FTP locations. You can configure threshold values for Rate and Volume discrepancies hence automatically convert qualified discrepancies to disputes.
What benefits it can deliver
- Zero-touch invoice reconciliation to identify and manage billing disputes.
- Allow wholesale fraud mitigation such as shortstops and smart FAS using near real-time communication and gather evidence to have a transparent relationship.
- Ensure transparency and trust through reports, alerts & notification
- Long term successful partnerships
How the Power of 5G will Redefine Partner Management
Subrat Saurabh is a Product Pre Sales Director responsible for driving the partner ecosystem management initiative at Subex. He primarily focuses on enterprise solutions and Billing & Settlement while engaging in digital transformation consulting for telecom and other B2B enterprises.