October 2012

Precision Clockworks: How Revenue Assurance Synchronizes with the Business at Swisscom

interview with Marco Pollinger

Switzerland is renowned for its culture of engineering, craftsmanship and organization. The obvious examples are watch-making, cheese, and chocolate, but here are a couple others:

The Schweizer Garde is a corps of Swiss men responsible for the security of the pope at Vatican City in Rome.
The country is so small and secure that its seven federal councilors of the Bundesrat -- the country’s heads of state -- take public trains to work and hardly ever need bodyguards.

Even Mother Nature has given Switzerland a special place in her heart. The nation boasts Aletsch Glacier, Europe’s longest glacier at 22 kilometers. Then there’s the Matterhorn of Zermatt, the mountain whose pyramid-like shape seems to symbolize the balance of nature and engineering.

About Swisscom

Swisscom Ltd. is the leading telecom operator in this affluent nation of 8 million. Though Swisscom has no significant rival in the fixed line biz, it’s required by law to provide equal access to its wireless competitors. Here’s a quick rundown of Swisscom’s mobile rivals:

The other strength of Swisscom is its breadth of services. It offers the full gamut from fixed and mobile voice to fast internet and digital TV. In the TV market, Swisscom squares off against one large national operator, Cablecom, as well as several regional cable companies. Another interesting fact: Swisscom’s Bluewin.ch website is the most visited in the country. Oh, and Swisscom also runs a healthy IT services business serving corporate clients.

Joining us now from Swisscom is Marco Pollinger, Head of Revenue Assurance. In our interview Marco delivers insights on how Swisscom manages its revenue assurance function for maximum effect. Among other topics, he discusses the company’s innovative RA organization, and how it screens new services, performs pre-production bill audits, and coordinates with corporate risk management. Think of this interview as a rare chance to view the inner workings of a Rolex watch.

	Dan Baker: To begin, Marco, I understand the way the revenue assurance function is managed at Swisscom is rather unique. Can you explain how you are organized?

Marco Pollinger: Sure, Dan. To lay the groundwork a bit, organizationally we fall under the finance department. Reporting directly to the CFO, my boss is the head of central controlling and business assurance, which includes overseeing our fraud assurance team.

The scope of the Revenue Assurance Team includes all revenues of Swisscom (Switzerland) Ltd. It includes private customers, small and medium sized companies, corporate business and also 150 wholesale and MVNO partners.

I guess our unique approach is to manage RA using two teams: a Strategic and a Technical team. Let me explain what these teams do, starting with the strategic RA team.

The Strategic RA Team

The Strategic RA team is six people and that’s what I head up. We’re focused on risk assessment of every revenue stream and also documenting our RA procedures to show how it works including the many systems involved. Each of us on the team has a deep knowledge of finance, technical, auditing, and operations.

On the strategic side, we need to have a wider focus, so we don‘t look at historical leakage risks alone. We do deeper risk assessments and make proposals to initiate projects to mitigate our risks. RA case handling is also managed by the strategic team.

Finally the strategic team is involved in the revenue assurance clearing/endorsing of about 95% of technical platform changes and new service launches at Swisscom. As we analyse each project, we ensure that the leakage and overcharge risks are already reduced before launch and the right control points are identified.

The Technical RA Team

Our technical team (about 7 people), which is a part of Network and IT Operations department focus on the technical definition of controls and their implementation. For instance, when new services are being launched like LTE and Machine to Machine, they will be involved in the project to analyse the technical impacts and to implement new or adjust existing controls..

The technical team also worries about how RA results are visualized and they support the RA tools for the operational business. We feel it’s key that the operational business review any control that gets an alarm. Now while there are many controls implemented by Technical RA, the operational business also implements many controls on their own.

The Revenue Assurance Work Flow

So now let me walk you through the flow of revenue assurance work.

It typically begins when the Strategic Team identifies a risk and a need for a control to reduce that risk. We then discuss this with the operational business and the Technical RA Team so we all agree on how best to implement. The technical RA team then takes the ball and implements the control including alarm visualization, threshold and monitoring frequency definition. Later, as alarms are received, those go to the operational business who first investigate and attack any leakage or overcharge if it in fact exists.

If it’s a true leakage or overcharge, then the Strategic RA team goes into action and leads the resolution of the problem which could include: informing customers, adjusting controls, making a recovery, and informing management. Depending on the complexity we decide how the customer is going to be informed. For instance, by phone, notice on the bill, special customer letter, etc.

	What are some of the operational and business challenges that occupy a lot of your energy in revenue assurance?

Dan, the very fast implementation of new products is definitely the toughest challenge. The Swiss market is quite saturated and as we try to gain market share against our rivals, we need to be very fast to market. So RA plays a key role in helping marketing launch quickly and minimizing the risk of revenue impact lots of coordination is required around improving project processes and inserting business controls.

Like many operators, we believe that mobile usage revenue is going down and revenue from flat or recurring fees is increasing: we believe postpaid will eventually settle to around 80% of all revenue. So that keeps us busy monitoring revenue across the value triangle of bills, contracts, and networks.

Most of our business today is already postpaid and with our new products we try to increase this even more. For example, this summer we started a new mobile product family called Infinity featuring several plans billed at flat rates. The major difference across those plans is the amount of bandwidth -- data, voice, and SMS are included in all the plans. Besides other goodies, we do offer one incentive for the highest prices plan, namely 200 free minutes of international calls from abroad.

	So how is it that you ensure products are launched with minimal revenue assurance issues?

Well, that’s where our project clearing role comes in. RA is a part of the product creation and improvement process at Swisscom, where all the products are passing through. RA reviews the project and based on the revenue risk impact provides the project team with a decision of “Go”, “No Go”, or “ Conditional Go”. In case of conditional Go, the project is provided with a risk map and the required measures to be taken to cover the risks. The flow of our activity is shown in the diagram below.

Revenue Assurance Clearing Process

To illustrate, let me explain the role we played when the business wanted to change our wireline billing system a couple years back.

With the billing system, there were risks on both sides of the billing system decision. For example, if the billing system was not launched, you risked not being able to introduce some attractive new services, meaning you would lose customers. On the other hand if the new billing system completely failed and you lost the ability to bill for two months, cash flow was in jeopardy and might have an impact to pay your suppliers.

So RA was focused on the operational Revenue Assurance risks and figured we needed to add certain controls before we rolled out the new billing platform. At the beginning of the project, we worked with the billing project steering board to define what RA risks they were willing to take. Then shortly before the launch, we calculated the RA risk and determined that the risk was actually higher than the acceptable risk appetite the steering team said they could live with at the beginning. That’s why we gave the new billing platform project a “No Go”.

Finally the project management decided to take the risk and to launch the project because the time to market was very critical. So there’s often a trade-off between different risks and time-to-market.

During the whole project our input was constantly given to the corporate risk management team who added other risks. So this gives you an idea how we coordinate different risk assessments to enable better decision making.

	How does RA interact with your executive management?

The management of Swisscom supports the RA effort very much. They see the added value it brings.

The RA strategic team has regular exchanges with the corporate strategic risk team. The corporate team is looking at overall risks at Swisscom. And we are focused on operational risk management from an RA perspective.

On a yearly basis, we discuss with the corporate team our risk map. And they, in turn, merge the picture of operational risks with their own to advise the CEO.

Then there are the standard reports that senior managers have access to. We reveal the number of leakage cases, including prevented leakage, overcharges, and prevented customer impact on overcharge cases.

	What kind of software are you using in revenue assurance?

We have different software in place depending on the product, the risks, and the history. And we are quite satisfied with the commercial tools we have in place, for instance, cVidya’s MoneyMap which is used for selected activities and implementation of innovative controls.

Still, our aim is not to consolidate on one commercial tool. In fact, several of our own tools are also used to perform revenue assurance tasks.

While it would be nice to have one RA tool that provides all is needed, we’re not yet convinced the expense and risk would justify that. In German, we talk about an Eierlegende Wollmilchsau [translated as an Egg-Laying Wool-Milk-Sow], a mythical farm animal that delivers everything you want.

	I think the quest for an all-purpose tool is an eternal one. Mark Yelland talked about it here in a recent column. Marco, I want to thank you for the many interesting ideas you’ve given us to think about. Are there any other innovations we haven‘t discussed you’d like to mention?

A couple things, Dan: our preventative billing checks and annual risk assessments.

Preventative Billing Checks

First, we conduct a pre-production check on our bills, then later follow up with a check on the bill after it issued.

In the past we had a team who looked at bills manually. The bills were looked at by product and by marketing/project team. And we made sure that every product was checked at least once a year. We found that practice to be very efficient at finding mistakes and preventing actual customer and/or revenue impact. Building on that experience, we recently automated our invoice checks so we can now examine a lot of bills every month for every product. The manual checks of bills are still done — but focused on new products which are not yet possible to automate.

This standardized process is now part of the RA control framework. The checks are performed by the billing operational team. Every month we find some minor points to analyze and correct.

Risk Assessment of Revenue Streams

The second innovation I think people will find interesting is our annual risk assessment of individual revenue streams. Every RA manager is responsible for several of the 26 revenue streams we defined: Mobile Prepaid, Swisscom TV, Roaming, Internet, Value Added Services, etc. And each year those streams are analyzed in depth to assess the risks.

We then focus on the top risks per stream and document the required measures to mitigate those risks. The goal is having these measures implemented during the following year.

We would like to thank cVidya for introducing Marco to Black Swan.

Marco Pollinger

Marco Pollinger is Head of Revenue Assurance at Swisscom (Switzerland) Ltd. Since joining the company in 2002, he’s held several cost controlling duties and responsibilities. Chief among them was the introduction of activity-based costing for the mass-produced products of the Network & IT division, leading a subproject in a strategic programme, and acting as a team leader in controlling services.

In 2009, he joined the company-wide Revenue Assurance team and he was first responsible for reducing the risk of revenue loss within the Wireline products (voice traffic and access fees). As a special task he introduced KPIs for Swisscom’s preventive activities within the product development process. In early 2011 Marco was promoted to his current Head of Revenue Assurance post. Contact Marco via

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

Expanding the Scope of Revenue Assurance Beyond Switch-to-Bill’s Vision — Araxxe — How Araxxe’s end-to-end revenue assurance complements switch-to-bill RA through telescope RA (external and partner data) and microscope RA (high-definition analysis of complex services like bundling and digital services).
Lanck Telecom FMS: Voice Fraud Management as a Network Service on Demand — Lanck Telecom — A Guide to a new and unique on-demand network service enabling fraud-risky international voice traffic to be monitored (and either alerted or blocked) as that traffic is routed through a wholesaler on its way to its final destinations.
SHAKEN / STIR Calling Number Verification & Fraud Alerting — iconectiv — SHAKEN/STIR is the telecom industry’s first step toward reviving trust in business telephony — and has recently launched in the U.S. market. This Solution Guide features commentary from technology leaders at iconetiv, a firm heavily involved in the development of SHAKEN.
Getting Accurate, Up-to-the-Minute Phone Number Porting History & Carrier-of-Record Data to Verify Identity & Mitigate Account Takeovers — iconectiv — Learn about a recently approved risk intelligence service to receive authoritative and real-time notices of numbers being ported and changes to the carrier-of-record for specific telephone numbers.
The Value of an Authoritative Database of Global Telephone Numbers — iconectiv — Learn about an authoritative database of allocated numbers and special number ranges in every country of the world. The expert explains how this database adds value to any FMS or fraud analyst team.
The IPRN Database and its Use in IRSF & Wangiri Fraud Control — Yates Fraud Consulting — The IPRN Database is a powerful new tool for helping control IRSF and Wangiri frauds. The pioneer of the category explains the value and use of the IPRN Database in this 14-page Black Swan Solution Guide.
A Real-Time Cloud Service to Protect the Enterprise PBX from IRSF Fraud — Oculeus — Learn how a new cloud-based solution developed by Oculeus, any enterprise can protect its PBX from IRSF fraud for as little as $5 a month.
How Regulators can Lead the Fight Against International Bypass Fraud — LATRO Services — As a regulator in a country infected by SIM box fraud, what can you do to improve the situation? A white paper explains the steps you can and should you take — at the national government level — to better protect your country’s tax revenue, quality of communications, and national infrastructure.
Telecom Identity Fraud 2020: A 36-Expert Analysis Report from TRI — TRI — TRI releases a new research report on telecom identity fraud and security. Black Swan readers can download a free Executive Summary of the Report.
The 2021 State of Communications-Related Fraud, Identity Theft & Consumer Protection in the USA — iconectiv — This 49-page free Report on communications-related fraud analyzes the FTC’s annual Sentinel consumer fraud statistics and provides a sweeping view of trends and problem areas. It also gives a cross-industry view of the practices and systems that enable fraud control, identity verification, and security in our “zero trust” digital world.

cSwans of a Feather

LATRO’s Tips for Launching a Successful Revenue & Fraud Assurance Program for Mobile Money Operations in Developing Countries — interview with Don Reinhart — A company building mobile money RA/FM tools and managed services gives a concise, but detailed tutorial on how the Mobile Money Ecosystem works. Revenue assurance pros will get tips on what to look for in analytics/assurance tools, controls, and professional services.
PrologMobile’s Simple and Brilliant Plan to Save US MNOs Billions a Year in Recovered Phones & Retained Customers — interview with Seth Heine — An expert in the mobile phone reverse supply chain explains how MNOs — via a neutral third party information exchange — can recover their original phones on the used market and save huge sums in multi-year customer retention.
MTN Agility: Mastering Exponential Technologies in Revenue/Fraud Assurance and Beyond — interview with Danie Maritz & Tony Sani & Luke Taylor — An in-depth look at RAFM operations and innovation at the MTN Group. Topics discussed include RA/fraud control challenges, strategies, and MTN’s journey to exploit exponential tech (AI, robotics, and ML) in its RAFM program and support of internal non-telco businesses.
From Byzantine Software Contracts to Simple & Flexible RA Managed Services — interview with Philippe Orsini — Is the way B2B/enterprise software is sold and delivered today progressive — or is it Byzantine in the age of cloud? An expert lays out the case for managed services in RA and billing verification.
WeDo Hosts Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management Conference in Washington DC — by Dan Baker — Black Swan is pleased to announce what looks to be a first class revenue assurance and fraud management conference being put on by WeDo Technologies, on October 1st and 2nd in beautiful Washington DC.
Migrating systems or launching LTE next year? Don‘t forget transformation assurance & optimisation — by Efrat Nissimov — System transformations and network migrations are major revenue impacting events and they should raise a big red flag. Why? Because data integrity issues are bound to crop up as CSPs move vital data from a legacy system to something new. It’s time for transformation assurance.
Make Business Assurance Progress Every Day: How to Set Goals, Automate, and Energize Your Team — interview with Kathleen Romano — Business assurance (BA) skills have wide applicability outside the revenue assurance and fraud mangement domains. In this article, a telecom executive explains how she’s applying her BA skills in the Payments area. In addition to discussing the key operational challenges in Payments, the interview also provides keen insights on setting goals in business assurance, leading a team, and making critical decisions.
LTE Rollout: Make it a Smashing Success with Risk Assessment, Controls, and Marketing Offer Analytics — by Gadi Solotorevsky — LTE brings splendid new capabilities to mobile users. But like 2G and 3G deployments before, operators can only make money if they successfuly plan, coordinate, deploy fast, and pay attention to pricing plans and the customer experience. This article lays out a 3-phase tactical guide on how revenue analytics professionals can add value in LTE service risk assessment, controls, and marketing offer analytics.
Precision Clockworks: How Revenue Assurance Synchronizes with the Business at Swisscom — interview with Marco Pollinger — An expert revenue assurance department is one whose work dovetails well with the lines of businesses it supports. In this interview you’ll learn how Swisscom manages its revenue assurance function for maximum effect. The article discusses: the operator’s innovative RA organization, the screening and RA approval of new services, its pre-production bill audits, and its coordination with corporate risk management.
Bringing Strategic Planning & Value Engineering to Revenue Assurance — interview with Maged Fawzy — Engineering and architectural techniques have a role in revenue assurance. This interview with a top Egyptian RA consultant explains how continuous risk assessment and long range — yet flexible — RA planning can sharpen a carrier’s RA program and lead to better use of revenue assurance software and integration services.
Forensic Fossils: Is Your Revenue Assurance Shop Fit for Display at a Natural History Museum? — interview with Jim Marsh — Without the continuous guiding light of seasoned revenue assurance leaders, even the best teams of RA professionals, technology, and business processes can fossilize and lose their vitality.
Revenue Assurance: The Magical Market Cap Multiplier — by Van Howard & Curtis Mills — Many operators today consider revenue assurance yesterday’s opportunity. But this article shows why significant revenue and cost leakage can still go undetected, even in companies with dedicated RA departments. Also discussed are the benefits of a broader or more “forensic” approach to revenue assurance, an approach that boosts the bottom line regardless of the automated tools already in place.

Tokopedia, Indonesia’s E-Commerce King, Partners with 11 Million Merchants; Adopts Multi-Cloud to Drive Innovation — interview with Warren Aw & Ryan de Melo — Indonesia’s Tokopedia, founded in 2009, has grown to become one of world’s leading e-commerce players. Read about its success, technology direction, and multi-cloud connectivity adoption.
Bridge Alliance: Knocking Down Regional & Mobile Connectivity Barriers so Connected Car Markets Get Rolling in Asia — interview with Kwee Kchwee — The CEO of an Asian consortium of mobile operators explains how they help simplify and harmonize their members‘ operations in support of multi-national corporations. This integration is enabling two huge industries to come together in Asia: auto manufacturing and telco.
Epsilon’s Infiny NaaS Platform Brings Global Connection, Agility & Fast Provision for IoT, Clouds & Enterprises in Southeast Asia, China & Beyond — interview with Warren Aw — Network as a Service, powered by Software Defined Networks, are a faster, more agile, and more partner-friendly way of making data global connections. A leading NaaS provider explains the benefits for cloud apps, enterprise IT, and IoT.
PCCW Global: On Leveraging Global IoT Connectivity to Create Mission Critical Use Cases for Enterprises — interview with Craig Price — A leading wholesale executive explains the business challenges of the current global IoT scene as it spans many spheres: technical, political, marketing, and enterprise customer value creation.
Senet’s Cloud & Shared Gateways Drive LoRaWAN IoT Adoption for Enterprise Businesses, Smart Cities & Telecoms — interview with Bruce Chatterley — An IoT netowork pioneer explains how LoRaWAN tech fits in the larger IoT ecosystem. He gives use case examples, describes deployment restraints/costs, and shows how partnering, gateway sharing, and flexible deployment options are stimulating growth.
ARM Data Center Software’s Cloud-Based Network Inventory Links Network, Operations, Billing, Sales & CRM to One Database — interview with Joe McDermott & Frank McDermott — A firm offering a cloud-based network inventory system explains the virtues of: a single underlying database, flexible conversions, task-checking workflow, new software business models, views that identify stranded assets, and connecting to Microsoft’s cloud platform.
Pure Play NFV: Lessons Learned from Masergy’s Virtual Deployment for a Global Enterprise — interview with Prayson Pate — NFV is just getting off the ground, but one cloud provider to enterprises making a stir in virtual technology waters is Masergy. Here are lessons learned from Masergy’s recent global deployment using a NFV pure play software approach.
The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business — interview with Jennifer Kyriakakis — The digital enabler is a central platform that ties together charging, self-care, and marketing. The article explains why leading operators consider digital enablers pivotal to their digital strategies.
Delivering Service Assurance Excellence at a Reduced Operating Cost — interview with Gregg Hara — The great diversity and complexity of today’s networks make service assurance a big challenge. But advances in off-the-shelf software now permit the configuring and visualizing of services across multiple technologies on a modest operating budget.
Are Cloud-Based Call Centers the Next Hot Product for the SMB Market? — interview with Doron Dovrat — Quality customer service can improve a company’s corporate identity and drive business growth. But many SMBs are priced out of acquiring modern call center technology. This article explains the benefits of affordable and flexible cloud-based call centers.
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Crossing the Rubicon: Is it Time for Tier Ones to Move to a Real-Time Analytics BSS? — interview with Andy Tiller — Will tier one operators continue to maintain their quilt works of legacy and adjunct platforms — or will they radically transform their BSS architecture into a new system designed to address the new telecom era? An advocate for radical transformation discusses: real-time analytics, billing for enterprises, partnering mashups, and on-going transformation work at Telenor.
Paradigm Shift in OSS Software: Network Topology Views via Enterprise-Search — interview with Benedict Enweani — Enterprise-search is a wildly successful technology on the web, yet its influence has not yet rippled to the IT main stream. But now a large Middle Eastern operator has deployed a major service assurance application using enterprise-search. The interview discusses this multi-dimensional topology solution and compares it to traditional network inventory.
The Multi-Vendor MPLS: Enabling Tier 2 and 3 Telecoms to Offer World-Class Networks to SMBs — interview with Prabhu Ramachandran — MPLS is a networking technology that has caught fire in the last decade. Yet the complexity of MPLS has relegated to being mostly a large carrier solution. Now a developer of a multi-vendor MPLS solutions explains why the next wave of MPLS adoption will come from tier 2/3 carriers supporting SMB customers.
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