Top 3 Blockchain Use Cases That Telco’s can Adapt in Quick Time

Blockchain as a technology comes with its own advantages and disadvantage. But using its advantages at right place and on right use case can be of huge benefit. Place where we need transparency, traceability, quick revenue recognitions, Operational efficiency and an environment with zero discrepancies. An environment where the result or actions are dependent on multiple transactions by multiple parties, where correlation of multiple transaction is important for E2E authenticity. And that is were Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) often termed as Blockchain (as information/transactions are chained together), comes handy.

And the Smart contracts running on top of this chained data which is nothing but business rules or we can call it check points.

There are many ways blockchain can be used to make most out of above-mentioned benefits, few of them I am narrating below but the list is bigger and does not stop here. These use cases will only need private DLT instead of public DLT with controlled access, not a large-scale setup and simple.

 1.Blockchain based Dealer Management

Telco’s are surrounded and dependent on dealer ecosystem. These dealers play the role of resellers for telco’s services and solutions. These indirect sales channels are more in volume as compared to direct sales channels and this is true in most of the telco’s. Dealer ecosystem value chain starts with onboarding, contracting, inventory tracking, sales and related settlements & payments.

Key areas in this value chain where blockchain based ecosystem can play a role can be:

• To build a transparent & trusted dealer management ecosystem
• Fraud alerts across the value chain
• Discrepancy free settlements and payments

Blockchain can help track & deliver:

• Dealer Onboarding Checks
• Dealer contract tracking
• Dealer Inventory allocation & tracking
• Dealer sales verification (Claimed to be sold, but is it activated & delivered or not?)

Blockchain can establish an ecosystem between a telco and its dealers for a transparent business and trusted financial transactions.

2. Blockchain based Margin Management

Overall Margin is very simple to identify i.e. Cash Out vs Cash In or we can say Cost vs Price. If it sounds so simple, then why getting perfect margins analysis is so difficult and many organizations are still struggling to figure out the exact margin on different solutions, products and services?

Reason is also simple, it’s difficult to find and track each component that contributes to cost and then compare it with final price. There can be direct cost, indirect cost, hidden cost and we can have random cost in-between which is difficult to track.

DLT can be used for calculation of accurate margin, but more important use of DLT in this case is to track and ensure good margin and raise red flags if margins are going down. Near real-time tracking on margin impacting factors and alerts on margin thresholds is the most important benefit we can get out of DLT based margin management solution. I am not talking about high transactions like XDR’s for margin calculation, rather we can use summary XDR’s and only final transaction in case of enterprise services. We must offload heavy transactions outside the blockchain and only register the results and key information into the blockchain.

The key is, near real time capturing of immutable cost transaction, link them to overall service and compare it with pricing.

3. Blockchain based Data Governance

Data integrity across different systems and teams is utmost important when there is a data movement across organization and many key decisions are taken based on that. Any Data discrepancy in such scenario can have:

• Direct impact on customer experience,
• Impact on business decisions,
• Operational inefficiency in identifying and solving the issue.

Take an example of a typical value chain where: A Product/Offering is designed, then installed/implemented, then customer orders it, then the order is delivered, then the order is billed. Different teams and systems get involved in this value chain. If we want to ensure E2E Data integrity a governance should be setup to ensure:

• As Designed vs As Installed
• As Ordered vs As Implemented
• As Ordered vs As Billed

Feeding key data into blockchain consortium made across these systems, setting up smart contracts to implement key check points and take timely actions to solve problems in near real time.

As stated earlier, the use cases does not stop here. Please provide your comments on more possible use cases and lets explore together.

DLT is a technology and just DLT at core of these use cases is not enough, we need these use case solutions to be wrapped up with additional aspects which completes solution. As described below but not limited to:

1. Onboarding
2. Dynamic Economic models between partners and Telco’s
3. Running analytics on the available data to achieve predictive and perspective outcomes
4. Reports and interactive business dashboards for visualization
5. Configurable platform to build new business use cases

In short, what we need is Blockchain as a Service (BaaS)

The Digital Trust portfolio at Subex can help in both existing uses cases developed at Subex Blockchain Labs and development of new use cases using blockchain expertise and these use cases comes along with required additional aspects delivered via Partner Ecosystem Management.

Subrat Saurabh

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.