The Voice Market – With Great Complexity Comes Great Opportunity

April 13, 2023

Dimitris Zoulis, COSMOTE’s Project Manager for Roaming Services and International Synergies, talks to Daniella Torres about how VoLTE, IoT, and 5G will impact the telecoms industry.

Digital transformation is happening. While many companies have recently allowed teleworking and found new ways of communicating with their customers to ensure business continuity, their primary driver continues to be increasing efficiency and improving agility.

The international wholesale voice market is expected to grow by 15% CAGR until 2032; however, overall margins are declining alongside the termination rates. To compensate for shrinking revenues, wholesale managers are looking to make quicker decisions and deliver better financial results YoY. Let’s examine the most common challenges posed by the current international voice market.

A typical carrier has wholesale agreements for voice termination with hundreds of other carriers, each sending multiple contracts, price lists, and invoices every month. A single price list can contain pricing for 100,000 destinations and different rates for landline, mobile, and time of day. Thus, carriers can be forced to track as many as 500,000 figures per month per trading partner – all delivered in different formats and often with varying dial code structures.​ The processes to manage this quantity of price lists, varied formats, data inaccuracies in rates and dial codes, and need for real-time synchronization between buyers and sellers are costly, time-consuming, and error prone. Operators cannot afford to run the risk of leakages caused by inefficient price list management leading to rating and billing errors.

Today, the dominant mode of price list communication involves origin-based rates. This means the same destination can incur different rates depending on the origin of the region or zone, country, and ultimately, carrier. Missing out on origin-based handling is potentially the most significant commercial loss for carriers; however, this has added profound complexity to rate analysis, routing, and billing. Business relationships have become highly complex to manage and the lack of granular visibility into offerings hinders growth.

Some tier-1 carriers follow a different strategy, opting for volume-based bilateral agreements with longer validity for a few destinations alongside a hubbing agreement for other parts of the world. These carriers also require forecasting capabilities to build the proper business case and tracking of commitment performance to avoid shortfalls and penalties. Since a single routing mistake often wipes out profit, these commitments will influence routing decisions.

Process automation is the key to better managing all this complexity. Carriers are turning their focus to automating repeated processes to:

  • Eliminate the risks of human error.
  • Enable consistency across systems.
  • Improve time to market and rollout of new offerings.
  • Drive efficiency and knowledge.

TOMIA addresses these challenges by offering a fully integrated, proven, end-to-end interconnect service. Our business exchange service called iXLink enables carriers to send and receive documents such as price lists, contracts, and invoices automatically, leading to a 50% reduction in time managing prices and disputes. The service allows the creation of multiple templates to import vendors’ prices seamlessly, with automatic formatting and validation rules. It also includes cost forecasting based on traffic, routing, and rates information, and an approval workflow for reference price generation.

In the upcoming blog, we will continue discussing carriers’ main challenges when addressing the enterprise business needs and how to tackle them.

Tell us how your teams manage the complex business relationships with multiple vendors’ price list formats and details by contacting us at: marketing@tomiaglobal.com

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