Intelligent decision helps CSPs sharpen their investment strategies and achieve comprehensive outcomes

Commercial context

Over the past few years, CSPs have increasingly sought to use their infrastructure beyond traditional telecom services to help modernize their business and foster sustainable, long-term growth. This has resulted in considerable investment into new business areas like fintech, commercial development partnerships, and 5G-driven vertical transformation, such as smart ports and smart education. This strategic shift towards the IoT market and value-added services has also seen CSPs explore various avenues in fintech, often developing products like digital wallets for authentication and transfers. While these initiatives have yielded varying degrees of success, the integration of AI into business operations is now empowering CSPs to develop entirely new financial solutions. In this new and highly-competitive financial solutions market, the industry needs a reliable framework to assist with investment in emerging fintech which aligns with internal strategic objectives.

The solution

This is the purpose of the Accelerating cognitive growth on WISE investment Catalyst, which is concentrating its efforts on an intelligent investment platform designed to enhance investment decision-making. This platform, based on the Workable Innovative Satisfy Efficient (WISE) framework, integrates sophisticated analytics to evaluate business proposals from multiple dimensions. The framework focuses on revenue generation but also balances customer experience, innovation potential, and operational efficiency. By incorporating financial projections, commercial feasibility, and technical viability, the platform ensures that investments are not only practical but also meet the needs of a company, and in some cases, its subsidiaries.

This AI-based solution works by prompting users to provide justifications for their investments, which in turn provides them with enhanced, accurate financial projections. It assesses proposals using a multi-faceted approach, taking into account both short-term gains and long-term returns. This comprehensive analysis includes anticipating stakeholder expectations and fulfilling key performance indicators. The platform’s situational awareness allows it to remain responsive to dynamic external factors and market fluctuations, ensuring well-informed investment decisions.

Moreover, the platform generates alternative courses of action, providing management with diverse sets of outcomes to consider. This adaptability is crucial in gaining an edge in the rapidly evolving technological and market landscapes. By fostering innovative problem-solving, the platform circumvents potential impediments, ensuring that resources are allocated with maximum efficiency.

Wider application and value

The introduction of the WISE framework signifies a transformative approach for CSPs and serves as an example for the wider industry to follow. By adopting this intelligent decision-making platform, CSPs can strategically evaluate diversification opportunities and new business domains. In practice, the solution helps ensure investments are feasible, explores disruptive ideas, satisfies customer needs, and optimizes resources for maximum return. This balanced perspective allows CSPs to thoughtfully diversify and expand into new markets, and at relative speed. The project team has already achieved success using the solution to support HKT’s mobile wallet, demonstrating how strategic investments guided by the WISE framework can yield substantial rewards - this positions telecom operators as significant players in the digital economy.

By applying the WISE solution, China Mobile Jiangsu have been able to support commercial complexes (such as shopping malls), digital technology solution providers and industry partners. By focusing on their partners’ demands, complex commercial challenges and business development goals, they have helped achieve fundamental transformation of entire operational processes, customer acquisition and retention, and sustainable economic growth. It’s also the first large-scale application of its kind inside China, and has helped the company achieve cooperation with a variety of commercial complexes, helping to halve their network costs and increase their traffic fivefold. By doing so, the CSP expects to create a consumer market worth hundreds of billions of renminbi.

Other CSPs have used the WISE to great effect. China Mobile IT has employed it to deliver successful decision intelligence-driven marketing campaigns. In doing so, they have increased their conversion rate of 26.27% - four times higher than the general push SMS message campaigns. China Unicom have also used WISE to establish an intelligent digital support system which used an outcome-based decision intelligence framework to improve 5G services. The significantly reduces the resources required for marketing analysis and decision cycles, and in some instances has resulted in a fivefold increase to efficiency. Overall, the CSP expects increase revenue in target regions, enhance high-value user spending, and reduced churn.

China Mobile Guangxi has used WISE successfully to efficiently allocate corporate resources to improve business development. After doing so, Guangxi Mobile's net profit continues to grow, up 9.5% in 2023, ranking fourth in the Group, and is expected to continue growth throughout 2024 and beyond. This is due to the successful application of WISE in a number of key business areas. Single-tower service fee has decreased by 13.2% year-on-year, associated maintenance costs for each ¥100 worth of network has decreased by 20% year-on-year, and new revenue brought by channel expenses has increased 26% year-on-year.

Another company in the Group which has achieved success through WISE is China Mobile Beijing. They have used the solution to establish a customer-centric service operation system which enables high quality development of home broadband services. These have demonstrable economic and social benefits:

• Marketing success rates and product conversion rates have increased by 26%, the proportion of gigabit users increased by 30%, and FTTR users also increased effectively, greatly assisting with market development
• The proportion of dissatisfaction with slow internet speeds dropped by approximately 80%
• Invalid network processing rates have reduced by 60%, and invalid door-to-door installations and maintenance personnel costs have been reduced by 50%

As explained by Michael Yue, VP at HKT, “HKT’s successful venture of our wallet underscores the broader applicability of this solution. By using data intelligence and innovative solutions, companies like China Mobile Beijing have also seen marked improvements in customer acquisition, satisfaction, and operational efficiency. For instance, targeted marketing efforts have significantly boosted the adoption of various digital products, while customer complaints have drastically decreased, leading to considerable cost savings. Overall, the intelligent platform not only guides strategic investments but also enhances the operational and customer-centric facets of telecom businesses. This holistic approach enables telecom operators to transition from low-growth entities to dynamic tech companies, capable of forging partnerships and entering new markets.”