Establishing prepaid and postpaid customers on a single system can lead to many new opportunities for service providers. But they aren’t convinced that the untested systems can ensure high performance, fault tolerance and scalability.Prepaid customers, once classed as an anonymous group of credit risks, are garnering newfound respect from service providers. As their target shifts from the credit-challenged to teenagers, college students and grandparents—all of whom are usually attached to a high-paying postpaid customer—service providers want to secure a holistic view of these subscribers.
Enabling flexible, customer-oriented services is only one potential benefit of a converged prepaid and postpaid billing system. Billing providers outline a half-dozen other advantages, which include lowering the costs of managing two systems, enabling data and content services for prepaid customers, limiting risk on high-value transactions, improving customer service and increasing ARPU (average revenue per user).
“In our vision, subscribers won’t be classified as pre or post. An operator will offer a customer a basket of services and two payment methods. How the customer pays won’t limit the types of services available,” says George McCarthy, director of product management and strategic marketing in SchlumbergerSema’s prepaid market segment.
This service parity becomes increasingly important in light of upcoming 2.5G and 3G services, but current prepaid systems handle voice only.
Merging Prepaid With Postpaid
The billing providers expect their preintegrated solutions to be a sure bet, but other industry experts disagree. “In today’s economy, when carriers are so squeezed, it’s difficult to persuade them to invest in entire new systems,” says David James, principal consultant at Ovum. “It’s more likely that they will add a piece to an existing system and replace the absolute minimum.”
As always, cost is a critical issue for service providers, but the billing developers counter that integrating disparate systems comes with a higher price tag than their converged offerings. “At this point upgrading an existing system is as costly as buying a new system,” says Rene Sotola, CTO for AMS’ Tapestry.
Moving away from cost issues, the billing providers attempt to sway operators by explaining the inherent benefits of a tightly coupled packaged solution. “Those service providers that want to force existing systems together will only achieve a loose coupling. The customer care software may be integrated with back-end billing, or the prepaid and postpaid billing may be integrated, or a shared product catalog may be created,” says Darren McKinney, director of Amdocs’ mobile product marketing. “But the loose couplings can’t support a common product catalog, a common rating engine, shared mediation, and a combined customer database. To get to that level, service providers will need a pre-integrated system.”
