Turn off RA for an hour and management will notice, turn it off for a week and the company will fail was one of the messages at the WeDo Technologies Worldwide User Group Summit (#WUGS16) in Lisbon, Portugal last week, writes George Malim in Lisbon.
Two significant challenges facing revenue assurance (RA) became abundantly clear. First, we live in a world of heightened risk as the digital economy creates new threats and, second, although everyone thinks they understand the risks, it’s hard for revenue assurance professionals to get the c-level attention they need to push through investment into the systems and resources that are required.
The event hosted more than 400 delegates composed of WeDo customers and other guests who came together to celebrate the company’s 15th anniversary but also to look ahead to work out how to address the revenue and fraud related challenges of the internet of everything and the digital economy.
It’s clear that as services being delivered over networks proliferate the risks become greater, frauds are launched faster and are ultimately more costly, both in pure revenue terms but also, and perhaps more damagingly, to their reputations.
“The whole world is going digital and doesn’t want to worry about revenue,” said Tony Poulos, a market strategy advisor for WeDo Technologies, in a presentation during the event. “As a revenue assurance industry we’re at the crossroads because whatever business you’re in, you’re going to become a digital service provider but we have no idea how big this will become.”
Poulos also acknowledged that revenue assurance and fraud management might be becoming an industry of diminishing returns, a victim of it’s own success in stemming leakage. “We’re getting so good at this that people don’t notice,” he said, bemoaning the challenges professionals face in gaining investment for revenue assurance projects.
“Don’t come to work for a week, send your team home and turn off your systems,” he jokingly told one operator representative who asked for suggestions on how to attract investment attention to revenue assurance. “Fraudsters will notice in about 30 seconds and tell all their friends. Switch it off for an hour and management will notice, switch it off for a week and the company will go out of business.”
Poulos was making a serious point that revenue assurance professionals find it hard to demonstrate their value and, the better they perform, the harder this becomes. With a project that has radically reduced fraud to an acceptable level in an operator it becomes difficult to gain the attention, let alone the investment as operator executives face so many other investment burdens – licences, virtualisation, the digital ecosystem, 4G, 5G and on and on.
“The problem is we’ve got a lot of doors to open,” admitted Poulos. “You therefore need to partner with someone who understands the business. That could be a consultancy or a company like WeDo. I believe that if you want to be successful and do this yourself you have to travel with somebody.”
Poulos also emphasised that revenue assurance professionals can do more to highlight the value they provide to the organisation. “As RA experts people have to recognise that you are the one in the business that understands risk,” he said, pointing out that professionals should be making more noise about their capabilities. “I ask RA people if they’re telling management that they’ve been analysing big data for ten years? There are people in network operations centres telling management how busy a base station is but RA professionals can tell them how much money it makes.”
As the industry moves beyond traditional network operations, these attributes will be vital. “Who will guard the internet of everything? Who will collect all the money? How will companies control fraud?” asked Poulos. “There are levels of fraud that we haven’t even considered yet.”
It seems there’s plenty of scope for operators and others to perform far more revenue assurance activity but professionals are hampered by challenges in gaining c-suite attention. WeDo’s contention appears to be that far from being unable to afford RA and fraud investment, companies in fact should be aware that they can’t afford not to prioritise it.
