ENGLEWOOD, Colo.-With a new solution and an enhanced billing platform, billing solutions provider CSG Systems is entering the prepaid space and leveraging its postpaid expertise to focus on a new trend among wireless carriers, prepaid and postpaid convergence.
The latest version of CSG’s Kenan/BP billing platform, the CSG Kenan/BP 11.0, includes CSG’s new Kenan Prepaid, making the platform, for the first time, capable of supporting both prepaid and postpaid services.
According to Malcolm Lewis, mobile industry director for CSG Systems, carriers, especially those outside the United States where prepaid penetration is extremely high, are beginning to view prepaid customers as more than “second class citizens.” However, the two are often treated as distinctly different groups, not only receiving different devices and services, but also residing on separate billing platforms at the carrier level.
Carriers are realizing they cannot afford to alienate prepaid customers, who often make up a significant portion of subscriber bases, by not offering them the same value-added services offered to postpaid subscribers. With CSG’s upgraded platform carriers can offer both sets of subscribers the same services and can manage those subscribers from one billing platform.
Asia’s Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (SingTel) will be the first to deploy the Kenan/BP 11.0 platform for both its corporate and consumer markets, upgrading form its current Kenan/BP 10.1 platform for the corporate market.
