How do you manage and mitigate BSS revenue assurance fraud and leakage across the revenue cycle?

Telcos need to keep pace with evolving fraud trends and fraudster behavior to identify & eradicate them at the very source. Here are some major fraud trends that telcos should watch out for:- 1. Subscription fraud (device acquisition) 2. Pre-paid SIM card fraud (card testing, money-laundering or fraudulent business) 3. International revenue share fraud (premium rate number abuse) 4. Account takeover (devices, payment data, points, identity theft) 5. SIM swaps (intercept OTPs for strong authentication) Ref: https://www.cybersource.com/en-us/blog/2021/five-key-fraud-trends-in-telco.html

Revenue Assurance (RA) is no longer just a buzzword; it's a lifeline for businesses. With digital transformation escalating fraud and leakage, a robust RA strategy is imperative. Key to a successful RA program is a holistic approach encompassing people, processes, and technology. This involves leveraging advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning to detect anomalies, prevent revenue loss, and ensure compliance. Proactive monitoring, real-time analytics, and automated workflows are essential to stay ahead of evolving threats. A customer-centric approach, coupled with robust audit trails and risk assessment, completes the puzzle.

Fraud Management Systems are designed to detect & prevent fraudulent behaviors of users causing revenue loses. There are several types of Telco frauds which can be detected using specific techniques or algoritms: 1. Collision checks 2. Velocity checks 3. Blacklist checks 4. Threshold checks 5. New subscriber checks 6. Pattern checks 7. Profile checks Ref: http://muratbalkan.net/2010/05/23/telecoms-fraud-management/

Through comprehensive individual risk profiles, a fraud management system (FMS) gives your customer service representatives access to prospective customers’ FICO scores, collections incidents, late payments, length of credit file and more. This information can then be used to help set appropriate deposit limits and tailored offerings before you fork over valuable services and equipment. FMS should ideally also integrate with supporting functions such as risk assessment and management systems and subscriber management and billing system to help a Telco make better, more informed business decisions.

One of the major issues that Telco's are facing with are losses from cloned unreturned customer premise equipments. Monitoring a prospective subscriber’s payment behavior and risk for delinquency not only helps to dramatically reduce bad debts by mitigating losses from unreturned equipment, but also improves collection rates and fraud prevention. A success story of a renowned Cable & Broadband provider says - “Our non-returned equipment rate has dropped from 50 percent to 15 percent since we started using FMS. Better still, the deposits we’ve collected so far will already cover more than 50 percent of the replacement expense.”

Investing in a fraud management tool or software, Telco's can secure networks and revenue with a significant advantage. Since it functions from the organization’s data and insights, it can very effectively prevent fraud. This type of system is also able to perform real-time actions to prevent fraud such as processing data, detecting potential or actual fraud, and providing suggestions on the validating decisions to be made. With an automated tool or software, fraud management can be truly functional since it enables detection and prevention to be instantaneous. Ref: https://www.subex.com/article/what-is-telecom-fraud/

Managing fraud risk at organizational level requires strong corporate governance. This would enable a Telco service provider to manage accountability, fairness, and transparency in its relationship with its stakeholders. Organizations must build a framework in which management operates by establishing policies that prevent and detect errors and fraud. A few keyways that all the stakeholders can help to mitigate fraud & revenue risk are: 1. Performing a Risk Assessment 2. Managing and Monitoring the Control Environment 3. Establishing and Monitoring Internal Controls 4. Establishing and Enforcing Solid Governance Policies and Procedures Ref: https://clarknuber.com/articles/managing-fraud-risk-through-strong-governance/