Today was the first day of the Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) London conference. Due to the ongoing global pandemic it was turned into a virtual online conference. The sessions began at 7:30 AM London time (2:30 AM in Waterloo, eek !) but I listened to the whole event from start to finish.
The conference covered revenue assurance, fraud management, cybersecurity, billing accuracy, enterprise risk management, margin optimization, cost management and other kinds of business assurance.
Revenue Assurance is a broad topic that can cover many issues in a telecom business. Many of the presentations highlighted the growth and evolution of revenue assurance from a simple audit type function to informal analytics to entire ecosystem tracking. RA professionals can not only increase the top line by preventing revenue leakage but also improve bottom line profits and cash flows, all without dampening demand. In fact
it can be said that business assurance is the only function that assures profit as it has the data to measure costs on a customer basis.
The near future for RA would be to embrace emerging technology such as Machine Learning and other for automating more and more processes. The skills of RA professionals in telecom will also find their way into other industries such as Finance, Utilities , Consumer and Tech.
There were discussions on the blockchain for telecom as well as specifically for battling Wangiri one-ring fraud. Other fraud management schemes such as STIR/SHAKEN, A&B # Handshake, and Seismic were discussed.
One of my favourite lines I heard today, reminded me of my sales philosophy with my own customers. “Trust is the biggest thing; it is about the relationship, it is not a transaction”. It was said in a discussion of RA working with internal partners such as network but it really did remind me of why I love my business and serving my customers.
Those are just some of the over-arching themes from over ten hours of superb content. If you missed it and are interested , some of the videos will be posted on the RAG website here.
Better yet, get yourself out of bed at 2:30 AM tomorrow and catch Day 2 of the conference live. That way you can participate in the Q & A sessions ! I am looking forward to it myself.
