Challenge
The use of Application-to-person (A2P) SMS has been growing rapidly, to reflect many enterprises’ increasing focus on customer relationships or operational security. For instance, a bank’s online system might send a text message containing a one-time password (OTP) to a customer, as an additional security measure as part of the login process. Although the operator customer was already handling this type of A2P traffic, its role was simply to terminate messages on behalf of intermediary aggregators, who held the commercial relationships with enterprise customers. As a result, the customer’s business was conducted with just a few aggregators, through a relatively small number of contracts to supply bulk SMS delivery services. These commercial relationships were so simple that contracts were being managed using an Excel spreadsheet.
The customer was becoming aware that this ‘delivery service’ role meant it was failing to build direct relationships with enterprise customers, realize the full value of the inbound A2P market, or be well-positioned for future opportunities – such as offering outbound A2P services for local-based enterprises to message their customers globally. However, engaging directly in the market would involve much greater complexity, in both contract management and message routing.
Solution
The customer chose TOMIA based on our established working relationship in the voice business since 2015. Although it had explored in-house development and sought proposals from other suppliers, our advantage was that we had the necessary intellectual property, which was already well understood by the operations team. That meant our solution involved merely adding a new module to our existing platform, making our proposition simpler and cheaper to implement, and, more importantly, a short learning curve for the SMS team to fully conquer the operation.
Our solution brought together two of our well-established products, to address the commercial and delivery aspects of A2P. iXLink provides a cloud-based business exchange platform, through which network operators and their partners around the world can share business information to negotiate and manage deals for buying and selling voice and SMS. The delivery aspect used our iXTools product to help the customer manage message routing dynamically and intelligently, based on factors such as service quality and pricing. This allowed the customer to provide A2P services to many enterprise customers directly and effectively, while also gaining the flexibility to offer different charging models and target different market segments.
Result
Beyond the strategic benefit of using A2P to build direct relationships with enterprises, our solution has given the customer more control over service quality, allowing it to offer differentiated service levels and pricing. For instance, a bank might need a highly reliable premium service to ensure that each OTP message reaches the relevant customer, while large-scale promotional campaigns might be unaffected by some delivery failures, making lower service quality a more cost-effective option. With TOMIA’s A2P solution, the customer can now manage how different messaging contracts are routed more effectively and offer a tiered range of service levels and prices.
The customer had been using this for its voice services, and knew its capabilities, which brought a three- to five-fold revenue efficiency increase over their Excel-based approach, while also substantially reducing pricing errors.
