- Mobile service providers will offer prepaid services and expand into emerging market segments. They will improve their cash flow by prepaid content
- High-Value subscribers will consider prepaid and postpaid as interchangeable payment options
- The rollout of converged offrings is hampered by legacy billing infrastructure, legacy intelligent network and the cultural division within many organizations
- Most off-the-shelf solutions offer rating, balance handling and replenshment, customer handling, product catalog and interface with commerce payments
- Mobile Service Providers will adop converged prepaid and postpaid billing system for cost-cutting, customer retention
- Mobile Service Providers need to overcome the legacy prepaid systems and offer convergent solutions
- Prepaid as Revenue Management
- Prepaid services could become an important part of mobile service providers' strategies for revenue management
- A converged solution enables subscribers to migrate between prepaid and postpaid, and allows mobile service providers to price products and services flexibly
- In many countries in Western Europe, North America ,Asia/Pacific and developing countries, prepaid has become the standard for using wireless services
- To increase revenue, mobile service providers have options: expand market segments, offer additional services
- Prepaid voice only mobile service providers will need to enable prepaid data and add postpaid services to enhance revenue
- Postpaid voice and data mobile service providers will need to add prepaid voice and data to compensate for declining revenue from postpaid subscribers
- Hybrid prepaid and postpaid mobile service providers will need to integrate existing stovepipe billing infrastructures to reduce costs, offer converged prepaid and postpaid services and convert prepaid subscribers to postpaid ones
<Prepaid ARPU as a Percentage of Post ARPU>
<Billing Support for Mobile Service Provider Market Expansion Strategies>
- For many mobile service providers, prepaid and postpaid will become alternate payment options that enable customers to switch wasily between prepaid and postpaid accounts
- Subscribers expect prepaid solutions to offer the same features and customer service as postpaid ones
- By improving prepaid offerings and service, mobile service providers hope to convert prepaid only customers to postpaid or converged subscribers
- Mobile serivce providers speculate that 3G content will show the rate of decline in voice revenue
- Inhibitors to Prepaid Billing
- Technological : the existing batch-oriented legacy billing infrastructure cannot handle the real-time billing required for prepaid service
- Financial : need to make significant investments in billing systems to adopt converged real-time billing systems
- Organizational : networking departments and IT departments make it difficult to obtain organizational buy-in for converged solutions
<The Main Inhibitors for Prepaid Billing>
- Prepaid Billing Approaches
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Hot Billing | new service is relatively straighforward,depending on charging mechanism | High Risk of fraud/real-time rating is not supported |
| Handset-Based | Good scalability/low cost of system setup | high risk of fraud/service limitation due to SIM card |
| Service Nodes | Keep existing infrastructure/low cost of system setup/low risk of fraud/easy to intoroduce new service | capacity of trunks between service and MSC |
| Intelligent Network | Good scalability/low rick of fraud/easy to introduce new services | Expensive and complex system set up |
- Migration Strategies for Convergent Prepaid and Postpaid Billing
- Migration strategies depend on the type of mobile service provider and the significance it attributes to converged prepaid and postpaid offerings
- Migration strategies should be driven by a cost-benefit analysis that considers incremental revenue from converged solutions against the cost and risk involved in the migration
- Mobile service providers that have determined the business value of converged prepaid and postpaid billing can do so in their customer relationship management (CRM) system, an adjunct rater, a convergent mediation system or a new converged billing and rating system
Mobile service providers only offering prepaid billing that want to add postpaid services to their portfolio can either:
• Add a separate billing system for postpaid
• Use an adjunct billing system for postpaid
• Implement a new converged billing system and dispense with their existing billing infrastructure
Mobile service providers only offering postpaid billing that want to add prepaid to their service portfolio can either:
• Use their postpaid event-based billing system for prepaid
• Add a separate IN-based billing system for subscribers with credit difficulties
• Use an adjunct billing system for prepaid
• Implement a new converged billing system and dispense with existing billing infrastructure
Hybrid prepaid and postpaid mobile service providers with separate prepaid and postpaid billing systems that want to offer convergent prepaid and postpaid billing can either:
• Do nothing
• Achieve convergence in the CRM system
• Use an adjunct rater that sits between the prepaid and postpaid systems
• Use a convergent mediation system
• Implement a new converged billing system and dispense with their existing billing platform
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