Telecom Lead India: KPMG said 94 percent of mobile
operators surveyed expect revenue leakage to increase due to emerging
technology trends including the shift to mobile commerce services and other
transformative technologies.
NFC-powered mobile commerce market to touch $74 billion
transactions by 2015
Near Fields Communications (NFC) will be fueling mobile
commerce transactions to $74 billion by 2015, according to Juniper Research.
NFC is increasingly used for the payment of goods in-store and as transport
tickets; this is over treble the estimated value of this market in 2011. The
increasing use of mobile devices as an alternative to credit cards and paper
tickets is one of the fastest growing segments of the mobile commerce market.
According KPMG, 74 percent of respondents said the
transformation to m-commerce such as mobile banking is the trend most likely to
impact the telecoms industry, followed closely by converged services (71
percent).
New revenue streams and the associated network and
billing systems for these services will be a source of leakage. Those areas
most vulnerable to leakage and fraud are the revenue streams with the largest
volume of payments including prepaid, roaming and postpaid plans.
“The pressure on the revenue assurance function to
detect and prevent leakages and recover losses has never been greater,” said Carl Geppert, Global Telecommunications & Advisory Lead and a partner
in KPMG.
Half of telecom companies have tied revenue assurance
performance to senior management pay.
“If we want revenue assurance to be taken seriously
at the very highest levels, we must be prepared to incentivize senior
executives for targets such as leakage prevention, detection and
recovery,” Geppert added.
Survey data for Europe and the Americas, both of which
have seen an increase in prepaid and data services, reveals that leakages of
over 1 percent of revenues have more than doubled from the 2009 survey, while
globally the number of telecom companies reporting that amount of leakage has
declined.
The revenue assurance function’s success rate at
identifying leakages varies from region to region: 41 percent of respondents
saying that they failed to identify more than half of total leakages, with
Europe and the Americas ranked highest in spotting leakages.
Asia Pacific is the lowest with 26 percent spotting less
than 10 percent of leaks. The rate of recovery is nearly the same with 40
percent of respondents retrieving more than half of all losses from subscribers
and suppliers.
