January 2022 | Globe Teleservice

2022 Priorities for telecom leaders

Over the past few years, telcos have come under pressure to identify new modes to add value to customers as traditional value pools deplete. This year, the telecom industry is geared to face new challenges and opportunities as the technological, regulatory, and competitive environments continue to evolve and change.

While augmenting network capacity by enabling wireless and fibre deployments to fulfil the demand for high-speed networks, telecom providers will also have to enhance the customer experience to remain relevant in this increasingly competitive market.

Some of the priorities for telecom providers in 2022 are:

Enhance customer experience

Industry surveys reveal that 56% of telecom operators rank enhancing customer experience as one of their top priorities for 2022. Research shows that 82% of telecom consumers would consider alternatives if they experience a poor customer journey. 27% of them would abandon the purchasing process entirely.

Telecom providers thus must identify ways to create more viable alternatives to deliver high-quality communication and internet services and identify opportunities to make new service and bundled service offerings.

Telecom players will have to identify how to redefine their interaction models and offer more Uber-like online experiences and also assess how they can leverage technologies such as AI, ML, Big Data, and analytics to redefine service delivery and enhance value capture models.

They also have to identify ways to continuously add value by streamlining new offerings to match an evolving voice market and support their customers with new models and technologies.

Adopting the managed services model

In 2022, telecom players will grow in their role of being business enablers. As the pandemic continues to influence the way people live and work, telecom players will have to identify ways to enable customer success by delivering end-to-end managed services.

Comprehensive managed services such as switch partitioning, geographically distributed switches with redundant connections to the Internet providers become important capabilities. That apart, burstable bandwidth and switch port usage flexibility, and the capacity to manage billing, accounting, credit monitoring, deal management, market management, dispute management, fraud control and usage alert, traffic report, and various other services are other essential capabilities to develop.

Routing optimization drives RoI

Telecom players have to look at optimizing revenues and plugging leaks to improve business outcomes. Establishing cost-efficient traffic routes, optimizing operations by efficiently routing voice traffic will be critical contributors of the same. Technologies such as AI and ML will emerge as enablers with deep analytics facilitating improved decision making.

Telecom players will have to leverage comprehensive technology solutions to make intelligent routing decisions and ensure improved call quality and the best rates. We cannot ignore the role of enabling technologies like AI and ML to drive greater efficiency for voice traffic and maximize the ROI.

Eliminating friction

Telecom players will have to eliminate friction from all customer and user interactions to accelerate growth. They have to gear up to support evolving customer needs and deliver elevated user experiences by providing world-class service.

Leveraging technologies such as API’s telecom players can integrate voice calling within applications and enable their clients to receive and control calls across global locations.

Telecom players have to also identify ways to build their virtual presence with geographically specific numbers and capably service their customers.

Rich Communication Messaging will need to rise

Telcom players will also have to enable businesses to upgrade from SMS to RCS especially as feature-rich messaging assumes the role of a new business driver. Much like proprietary messaging applications, RCS offers some rich features and allows compelling media exchanges. RCS is all geared to disrupt the world of business messaging by delivering a more compelling messaging experience.

The coming of 5G is further aiding the adoption of RCS messaging with 67.44% of online consumers located across Australia, Brazil, China, South Africa, the UK, and the US stating that they were already using a telco-based rich messaging service or would like to do so in the near future.

Telecom providers thus have to look at ways of upgrading their ecosystem by developing the right partnerships with aggregators, connectivity service providers and meeting the market demand for RCS.

Plug revenue leaks

As with every year, this year too, telecom players have to look for ways to plug revenue leaks and improve revenue opportunities by identifying new business opportunities, increasing their customer base, and improving brand recognition. Recent research shows that between 2020 -2024 telecom operators could be looking at revenue leaks amounting to an approximate $37.1 billion, or an annual average leakage of $7.69 billion to grey route traffic.

Adding new-age technology solutions powered by intelligent technologies such as AI thus become increasingly important for telecom providers. Plugging in big-data analytics with traditional messaging firewalls helps telcos identify fraudulent patterns faster. Implementing blocking rules will also become essential to reduce the time between fraud and fraud detection and improve the overall security posture.

Deploying deploy anti-fraud capabilities including data analytics, and 24/7 monitoring, reporting, and alerting also become crucial capabilities for telecom players this year.

In Conclusion

The international wholesale voice traffic is expected to exceed 1 trillion minutes by 2027. Along with VoIP networks, this is likely to fuel international wholesale voice carrier industry demand. While telecom players must capably fuel the growing demand for voice termination services and international roaming with the proliferation of the LTE network, they need to identify ways to amplify their network and infrastructure to enable new services, drive customer satisfaction, and capture new markets by stimulating market demands. Let us help you on your modernization journey to take on the new challenges of the new marketplace!

Globe Teleservices announces senior executive appointment to focus on Africa and the Middle East

Singapore, January 11^th, 2022

Technology solutions company Globe Teleservices Pte. Ltd., GTS, a global provider of traffic management, fraud detection and voice/SMS connectivity solutions today announced that it has appointed Akbar Amin Ladak as Executive Vice President – Middle East and Africa.

Akbar Amin Ladak will focus on growing GTS’ market in these key territories with a specific focus on driving market acceptance of the innovative new digital offerings. He will drive growth and brand acceptance in the fast-evolving global telecom market at a key turning point when major changes like the emergence of 5G and rapid digitization are imminent. A key part of his role will be to evangelize offerings aligned with the new telecom landscape.

“It’s a pleasure to have Akbar join the GTS team.” Said Ashutosh Agarwal, Founder and Managing Director. “His rich experience in launching and operating mobile networks and mobile wallets across multiple geographies in Africa will be invaluable in helping us expand our already significant footprint in this fast-growing region. His expertise, experience, and deep interest in telecom innovation make him a great fit for our future plans.”

An experienced leader, with close to 20 years of experience in the telecom space, Akbar has closely worked with many regulatory and development institutions to launch products and services that impact lives. Prior to GTS, Akbar was CEO of SMART Mobile by Lacell SU.

“It’s a genuine pleasure to join the talented team at GTS,” said Akbar. “GTS has an evolved way of looking at the telecom sector. They have a broad range of partners, a great market presence, and a comprehensive set of solutions. I am most impressed by their ability to keep evolving their solution portfolio as the technology ecosystem evolves. Right from blending in cutting-edge AI into their security solutions to expanding their vision to fold in eKYC and other digital solutions, Ashutosh and the team are always future-ready. I am convinced that GTS will play a key role in the progress of the telecom sector, and specifically in the Middle East and Africa.”

Akbar will report to Ashutosh Agarwal, Managing Director and be a key part of the executive leadership at GTS.

About Globe Teleservices

Globe Teleservices – GTS is a Singapore-based Telecommunications company, providing diversified and technologically advanced solutions for the global telecom industry and other technology-focused sectors. GTS is a leading international voice, messaging, and managed service provider that continues to grow and expand its footprint across the globe. GTS’s solutions extend the impact of telecom technology into sectors like banking and financial services to enable customer connectedness and engagement. GTS works closely with over 100 Mobile operators to provide solutions that have a direct impact on revenues and customer engagement with a focus on managing frauds and network vulnerabilities.

With an employee strength of more than 350, GTS has a worldwide presence in Dubai, India, Malaysia, Hongkong, Kenya, and Tanzania among others.

How can Africa’s telecom players become mobile money winners?

Research shows that much of the population in Africa has limited access to financial services. As incomes in the continent rise, that has meant that it’s become one of the most attractive places for banking opportunities.

Mobile money has been on the increase in this continent with deployments increasing 39% annually in the past decade. Both transaction volume and the value of mobile money have also witnessed double-digit growth. Some of the reasons for the growth of mobile money can be attributed to a lack of formal savings or credit, something that is prevalent in emerging markets as well as the rise of the telecom sector.

That apart, non-participation in the formal economy owing to social and economic reasons also pushes the population towards digital finance. The pandemic further accelerated the pace of digital/ mobile money adoption especially as African governments made it easier to leverage mobile money by reducing the barriers to sign up. In Rwanda, for example, mobile money transactions increased fivefold during a lockdown as governments eased regulations and reduced/waived transaction fees. In Malawi, 2019 IMF statistics reveal that fewer than 170 of every 1,000 adults have deposits in a bank account, whereas nearly 600 have a mobile money account.

The mobile money boom presents tremendous opportunities to telecom players to leverage the burgeoning market. Research also shows banks looking to partner with telcos to add value to their portfolio of services and grab a share of the mobile money boom. Mobile money is making financial services more accessible without the dependencies on traditional infrastructure.

As Africa becomes the world’s hottest place for mobile money, here are a few things for telecom operators to consider:

Keeping security top of the mind

Telcos have to keep security top of their mind to drive mobile money acceptance and adoption. Ensuring secure transactions by enabling next-gen impenetrable, robust, and resilient SMS firewalls will play a crucial role to ensure secure transactions since authentication messages and OTP’s are sent through these messages.

That apart, they need to ensure that no revenue leaks and illegal traffic flow through their routes. Identifying and blocking grey route traffic will assume paramount importance to prevent fraud, block illegal traffic and increase customer reliance on their services. Technologies such as Real-time monitoring, System-level filtering, and Intelligent SMS Firewall Rules will be of immense help to overcome the grey route and security challenge for telecom operators.

Friction-less customer experiences

To emerge as mobile money winners, telecom operators have to ensure that they deliver a frictionless payments experience to their customers. Whether it is the security of transactions or the ease of setting up digital identities, telecom operators have to look at ways to improve customer experience by identifying customer pain points and challenges.

Enabling facilities such as eKYC to simplify the verification process, make it more accurate and seamless not only enhances the authentication process but also makes the process more secure. Technologies such as AI and Machine Learning can further help in optimizing the KYC process and simplify identity and document verification.

Elevating network security

Network security is essential for telecom operators to win the mobile money wars in the African continent. With the promise of 5G on the horizon and technologies such as AI and IoT becoming commonplace, telecom operators have to make sure that the network connection and endpoints are secured appropriately.

While legacy networks will struggle to meet the modern-day network security requirements, looking at network virtualization and other strategies such as network slicing, more detailed and individual authentication processes, and technologies that identify changes and anomalies in traffic or behaviour patterns become important areas to consider.

Update the technology stack

One of the challenges that telcos need to navigate in Africa is that of the unavailability of skills in modern technology and a heavy reliance on ageing technology. Inadequate IT infrastructure and insufficient skills and experience with modern-day telecom tech can impact the pace of growth when telcos want to increase their portfolio and cash in on the mobile money trend.

Updating the technology stack to drive better security, ensuring end-point security, developing applications that are robust, fast, thoroughly tested, and optimized for speed and security, network infrastructure security and zero-trust application security architectures can help telcos expand their capabilities to increase their service portfolio.

These considerations apart, telecom players will also have to navigate the challenge of SIM jacking, SMS phishing, and SMA Spoofing to prevent information manipulation. Enabling proactive route testing, home routing and rerouting capabilities come in handy here.

Analysing the information exchanged between two parties to identify discrepancies proactively also becomes important for ensuring secure transactions. AI-ML-based voice firewalls, features such as global tile blocking, legal interception, blocking messages based on system-level filtering, intelligent SMS firewall rules, map operation codes, Live GUI, and CDR for analysis, etc are other ways to ensure greater security to prevent fraud and unhappy customers.

Currently, there are about 100 million active mobile financial services customers across Africa. The total MFS opportunity in this market is close to $2.1 billion or approximately two per cent of total African banking revenue pools. While banks identify ways to increase their footprint and get a share of this pie, telcos already have a large number of unbanked people on their networks. The ones to win the mobile money game will be those who can roll out the right products according to customer needs more securely. Telcos have already got one piece of the puzzle sorted. They can win the latter with advanced and cutting-edge telecom solutions with ease.