Have you ever found yourself at the kitchen table, surrounded by bills and receipts and various pieces of paper, getting that drowning feeling when you think of all the things you need to keep track of, budget for and pay in a way that makes sense? Life gets busy, but balancing the household budget to stay in the black remains crucial. That drowning sensation is one that service providers soon will find themselves in as the rise of new broadband-enabled services changes what carriers need from their third-party billing providers.
We have entered an era of always-on, often mobile, ultra-broadband hyper-connectivity. Every carrier has a strategy for taking a piece of the new revenue pie with innovative services that leverage this brave new world, whether it be powering emerging devices like e-books or partnering with third-party Internet video partners.
“And it is in many cases a different business now than it was for a hundred years previously,” said Dana Plummer, director of invoice operations at back-office specialist TEOCO. “They’re in a high-volume, low-dollar business now. It used to be a low-volume, high-dollar business.”
Mobile data, for instance, has gotten to its hockey-stick moment in growth. But data ARPU has not necessarily grown along with it, so no one customer brings a significant profit to the business. It’s necessary then to look across the whole of a service to gain a sense of its impact to the bottom line. And that means accurately charging and paying third-party invoices, and accurately cross-referencing that with other outgoing items in the cost-management system, such as what’s being paid for utilities. And to gain a truly clear picture of the state of the business, that information should be matched up against the revenue coming in from the service for a total view of profitability.
Meanwhile, the services mix has grown to include third-party content and applications, a bevy of wireless data services, cloud offerings and a host of nontraditional players. When dealing with potentially thousands of micro-charges per day and multiple new partners in the value chain, gaining a view into true profitability becomes much more convoluted of a process than it ever has been before.
A Looming Issue
In light of the growing complexity in the marketplace, a looming issue is that there has been a proliferation of billing formats that third-party billing systems need to process. As the industry evolves, the billing organization is no longer dealing with traditional record providers — RBOCs for voice, for instance.
