More than half of the world’s mobile subscriber growth is generated from emerging markets. With the exception of the U.S., countries considered to be “emerging” in Asia/Pacific, Africa, and Latin America constitute the top 10 mobile markets in terms of growth. Leading industry analysts state that these countries added around 285 million new subscribers in 2006.* Several emerging market governments have recognized that increasing ‘teledensity’ is a requirement for evolving their economies.  To that end, emerging market governments are: actively advocating telecommunications deregulation; offering new wireless licences to provide additional choice and increase competition; and laying the framework for a modern communications based economy.

Due to the high growth potential of these markets, a number of key mobile communications players are moving into these regions. For example, China Mobile Communications and the Vodafone Group are entering emerging markets to acquire market share from smaller and less experienced greenfield operators.  Within emerging markets, more sophisticated operators are consolidating operations in order to stimulate revenues, increase operational efficiencies across access technologies, increase economies of scale, and to increase the market power of a given brand over a broader geographic region.  A real-time convergent monetization solution must accommodate the expanding reach of network operators as they seek to provide consistent features and capabilities, which are simultaneously adapted to meet local considerations (e.g. service demographics and currency).  

Converged billing enables mobile operators to deploy rapidly a single customer care and provisioning system with immediate support for voice, messaging, and data across all account types - prepaid, postpaid, and hybrid – and across both individual and corporate/group account structures.  This ability combined with innovative services and complementary rate plans, means competitive differentiation in highly competitive and rapidly evolving emerging markets.

Converged real-time billing has been shown to deliver operational expenditure (OPEX) savings ranging from 42% to 77% for emerging market mobile operators. A single platform is easier to administer, maintain, and operate than multiple platforms for voice, messaging, data, m-commerce, prepaid, and postpaid. Also, a single converged platform  greatly streamlines customer-care training and support and enables the provisioning of multi-service (e.g. voice, messaging, content) bundles and hybrid accounts.  As the range of data services increases to include high-consumption services - such as mobile video, mobile TV, and MMS - the richness and value of service-agnostic subscriber bundles increases.

There is a requirement to support ‘pre-paid’ or real-time authorization, rating, and service control capabilities across voice, messaging, data and content in cash or cash-equivalent emerging market economies to improve the profitability of new services and eliminate costly fraud. Carrier-grade converged billing can accrue transactional charges independent of access technology (HSPA, 1XRTT, WiMAX) in order to support the development and implementation of emerging data services.

As additional wireless licenses are awarded in emerging markets, and global operators continue to follow their expansion strategies, smaller emerging market mobile operators must differentiate their services and provide a value-proposition other than price.  Converged billing creates differentiation and loyalty among subscribers and reduces churn by:
• Complementing social relationships in the form of group rate plans based on affinity groups (including friends and family)
• Enabling hybrid plans for families that allow for transfers between members and overseas remittances
• Delivering personalization whereby subscribers can select or change their tariff plans
• Adding mobile commerce services, international remittances,  and peer-to-peer micro-credit transfers
• Reducing subscriber acquisition costs due to lower converged billing OPEX
• Featuring real-time or top-up promotions that alert subscribers to new services or information
• Implementing loyalty programs whereby subscribers earn “frequent user” points to redeem rewards

The Middle East and Asia Pacific are regions where mobile subscribers widely use mobile phones to engage in commercial transactions, including support of ‘electronic ticketing’ (e.g. via depicted barcodes), to acquire goods and to facilitate the transfer of funds between groups.  With respect to enabling and deploying mobile-commerce, ‘emerging markets’ constitute a source of innovation relative to mature western mobile markets and  may eventually exceed the sophistication of mature wireless markets.

With the introduction of advanced data and real-time billing services, emerging markets will no longer lag behind the rest of the world but will instead boast communication portfolios and solutions that will be noteworthy from a global perspective.

*Source: http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=119439&page_number=1