Q&A: BT’s Global Transaction Strategy

Billing World Interviews Maria Pardee, CIO for BT Retail

BT no longer considers itself a telephone company. It is a networked IT services company with plans to facilitate every global transaction and exchange of information, data, content or application functionality that it can. Although most major operators are talking about new technologies like IPTV and IMS that promise a lot but have yet to deliver anything, BT wants to make accommodating customers its primary function. That’s not to say BT doesn’t believe in the IP services revolution. Its 21CN network and service transformation project is well under way as the company goes all-IP. But BT also sees a future in making interacting and transacting with and over its network as simple as possible, for as broad an audience as possible.

One aspect of this strategy widens the definition of a telecommunications customer. Typically, becoming a telecom provider’s customer involves walking through a mechanized process that includes a credit check to establish a person as a subscriber. No other business is conducted until the formal relationship with the customer is established. Contrast this with retail businesses, where anyone can walk in off the street and make a purchase using a range of payment options from cash to credit card. BT believes the next-generation services world combines retail characteristics with a global marketplace. As a result the company sees a strategic opportunity in capturing the market for transactions that result in products or services traversing global communications networks. To make this strategy work, BT is investing significant energy in its billing architecture, which BT Retail CIO Maria Pardee discussed with Billing World and OSS Today this month.

BWOT: Can you please tell us a bit about where BT stands in its ongoing billing consolidation and what the end state should look like?

Pardee: First let me give you a bit of background. Needless to say, BT’s history is that of an incumbent, so you can only imagine the myriad billing systems that we had—anywhere from 50 to 100-plus billing systems in the BT systems real estate. It seemed that any time, in the days of old, if you had new product you had a new billing system with it.

As we began trying to get to market fast with new products, we had a conundrum. In order to be fast we had to be simple, and to be simple we had to be disciplined with where we were going with our systems. Therefore, we’ve zoned in on the rule of one—a relentless focus on going with a single platform and infrastructure that has robust functionality for the future.

The challenge now is moving our systems over to our new Matrix architecture, at the heart of which is Convergys Infinys. We’re about halfway down the path. We’ve turned off about a dozen systems, and our new products are all rolling out under the Matrix platform.

BWOT: What role does billing play in your end-to-end OSS/BSS architecture, and what’s your vision for dealing with all different forms of billing and payment—prepaid, post-paid, real-time charging, interconnect, settlements, etc.?

Pardee: As part of the overall BT Matrix architecture we have 14 different platforms, and billing and payment is absolutely a cornerstone. It’s not simply a back-office operation for us. It’s something we see as a value-added service. You don’t rate and bill as we did in the past, where it was a CDR, ADR or packet—it should rate anything, any event, any product. Our plan is to bring in and sell anything from around the world. It doesn’t have to be created within BT. We can only imagine what those value-added services will look like, so we need to be prepared to bill for anything.

It’s not just about the service, though, but also about how our customers want to transact with us. That’s what our vision for our architecture of the future is about. If you look at the traditional model you would have to be vetted as a customer first. The provider would have to get information about you, check your credit, and set up a subscription. We don’t think that’s where the future is going. We want the customer to be able to transact like in a department store, or online, or with a street vendor—however you want to pay us, we want to be able to accept payment. Even if you don’t have an existing relationship with us, we want you to be able to transact with us.

BWOT: Is there another major billing vendor that plays a key role in your architecture?

Pardee: We still have relationships with companies like Kenan and Amdocs, and the true plan is that if Convergys has the capability or we can get that functionality up on the Convergys stack, that’s our biller of choice. But we have some one-offs where we have established relationships that we will continue with until they don’t make sense anymore. We have commitments to customers who are being well served with existing systems, and we need to make decisions around them as opposed to just consolidated licensing arrangements.

BWOT: What steps are you taking to protect consumer and customer information that lives in your billing and care systems, especially since you want to open things up so much?

Pardee: We look at this two different ways. We need to have a robust, secure infrastructure that protects all customer data, but there’s also a permission-based approach. A customer must be able to make choices about what they are willing to share and who they are interact with, so we need to have in place a permission-based infrastructure. For example, sometimes customers don’t necessarily want their identity known. If you walk into a store and pay cash you may not want to share any information about yourself. So we want to give the ability for privacy and for customer data to be shared or not shared based on the customer’s choice.

If you are going to interact in a global ecosystem, you have to protect consumer data. BT is a brand of trust, and we take that trust very seriously.. If we have a formal relationship where there’s an ongoing status between you and our trading partners, then we need to demonstrate to those partners and to our customers that we have a state-of-the-art infrastructure that supports security and encryption of the vast amount of information and money going across oceans and such. We are investing tens of millions to insure we can deliver that framework to our customers. You can tell from our procurements with our security partners today that we are making those investments.

BWOT: As you partner with content providers, what’s their perspective on the value of your billing capability to the partner relationship?

Pardee: It is absolutely a differentiator—first, because of the volume we can do, but also because of our ability to bundle. Let’s say you’re Disney. You want to get your product to market more than anything. We have an infrastructure that can let us sell movies and popcorn—bundle an offering. It makes our content partner’s product more pervasive—they can reach more customers—and we can transact their service in ways they had no potential of doing themselves, so we become the global wholesaler for them.

BWOT: How does the idea of subscriber mobility in IP services impact your billing architecture and process?

Pardee: It is not a secret where we think this market is going—it is any content to any device—phone, BlackBerry, TV, PSP, set top, or whatever you want to use. But what we think is really important is “any customer,” and we’re not sure anyone else has thought about it to that level of sophistication. By that we mean reaching any customer globally who is selling or buying product. If it has to transact over the global communications network, then we want you to do business with us.

BWOT: Do you see credit card companies growing as competitors for owning the billing and payment relationship as you diversify your payment options to customers?

Pardee: They’re actually some of our biggest customers, so you can imagine we have huge existing relationships with those companies. We are already their premiere network provider. In this new ecosystem, maybe Visa provides infrastructure our customer will use—it’s whatever is the best fit for the customer. We may be competing with them, as well, on some of the payment transactions—like if Visa wants to be the PayPal of all global services, but we’d still want to be Visa’s carrier of choice. We are having a lot of in-depth discussion about each others’ value propositions and whether they peacefully co-exist, or whether we have to stop at certain boundaries.