New Trends in technologies and CSP’s offerings, calling for evolved RAFM approaches

CSPs are amongst the trailblazers of the customer experience digital transformation by introducing omni-channel digital touchpoints with subscribers, enhancing customer onboarding and developing sophisticated loyalty schemes. However, it is not just customers who benefit from this digital revolution, as it has been accompanied by advanced fraudster methodologies harnessing the vulnerabilities and loopholes of the digital era. Fraudsters are notorious for always being one step ahead despite new countermeasures set by CSPs, as they strengthen their methods through sophisticated technological advancements, surpassing current anti-fraud measures, thus urging CSPs to establish advanced and more intelligent mechanisms to win the fight.

Having a closer look at the fraud landscape, one can recognize that fraud typology champions differ across markets. In developing markets, bypass and arbitrage frauds present a major concern for CSPs, where fraudsters exploit rate differences. In postpaid markets, where handset sales contribute to a considerable stake of the operator’s revenue, handset fraud pertains to substantial losses due to the evolving fraudulent methods such as subscription fraud (utilizing synthetic or stolen identities) and account takeovers enabled through scams and social engineering which have come to a huge rise. Despite awareness campaigns, scams and targeted social engineering schemes (including phishing, vishing and smishing) remain a central concern requiring action.

Fraud-proofing CSP innovation with advanced analytics

It is a fact that CSPs who face the light of innovation, inevitably have their back in the darkness of fraud. For example, as CSPs resort in promoting OTT data bundles to compensate the revenue losses arising from OTTs, the challenge did not stop there. OTT bypass is a rising fraud for CSPs nowadays, depriving them from a legitimate source of income. Also, flash calls protruding as an alternative method to A2P SMS verification used by OTTs and social apps again depicts a revenue-loss opportunity and brings the need for innovative fraud management approaches to the forefront of CSPs’ urging plans to topple the continuously evolving CSP-circumventing techniques.

Despite the numerous benefits associated with the advent of 5G and IoT, there comes an equally measured risk of fraud and revenue leakage which rises on the sophistication of these technologies. It is evident that 5G will create a chance for new fraud scenarios where fraud can be executed more quickly and precisely, insecure IoT devices could be exploited to perpetrate fraud, and phishing and social engineering can become more convincing and sophisticated to gain access to personal information.

Furthermore, with their unwavering efforts to grow beyond their core business, CSPs are converting to financial services through wallet/mobile money and digital card platforms, positioning themselves as a banking arm to subscribers to ease financial transactions. This has transferred the fintech fraud risks to the CSPs’ ecosystem, thus highlighting the need real-time analytics-driven platforms to detect unusual transaction patterns, payment fraud and anti-money laundering.

Revenue assurance in face of current trends

With 5G, revenue assurance checkpoints become more complex considering the dynamic nature of network slices and their associated SLAs as well as the concept of resource sharing between CSPs. Also, the sheer volume, velocity, and variety of data that 5G systems will generate, especially with the proliferation of IoT devices, will require a revenue assurance platform that ingests, stores, and delivers powerful analytics experience managing the entire data lifecycle and seamlessly identifying anomalous patterns to prevent losses.

Besides, the integration of financial services into the telecom ecosystem shall prioritize deploying fintech revenue assurance checkpoints to monitor financial transactions and prevent leakage across wallet/digital card platforms, loyalty systems, loan systems, as well as rating, commissioning, and partner billing processes.

AI in the RAFM landscape

In face of the aforementioned, proactivity becomes a real challenge. AI provides the solution with its ML algorithms capable to look for data patterns and enable telecoms to predict network anomalies. ML time series algorithms for instance are capable to learn the level, trends, seasonality, and patterns from historical KPIs to accurately forecast their future evolution and proactively detect any anomaly. Powerful AI/ML platforms are able to learn incrementally to adapt with the fraudsters’ changing and complex behaviors, detect in real-time and minimize the human intervention for maintenance. Besides, AI-powered investigations tremendously help businesses to understand, investigate and resolve fraud incidents by using explainable pattern exploration models and visuals, thus presenting a wealthy knowledge base for analysts to keep track of new fraud trends and their evolution over time.

The right investment with guaranteed returns

With these prominent risks and challenges, traditional and disparate RA and FM rule-based detection approaches become futile. As CSPs transition to new technologies and verticals to empower their offerings, their proactive RAFM measures should consider ML-powered platforms able to treat huge amounts of data and support resilient predictive models, real-time anomaly detection capabilities and end-to-end analytics lifecycle to yield faster, accurate and productive investigations and streamline enterprise decisioning. In a nutshell, scalable, real-time enabled, future-ready & ML-powered unified RAFM platforms promise high ROI as they assure proper adaptability with the new trends impacting CSPs’ businesses worldwide, preventing associated fraud and revenue leakage risks.

• This article has been created in cooperation with SAS and its strategic partner in telecom fraud Vanrise Solutions, You can learn more about SAS & Vanrise jointly supporting CSPs to protect their networks, subscribers, and revenues from fraud at the upcoming DTW-23 Ignite event.