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Payback time for prepay
Publicado por: Redacción
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 The prepaid customer: credit-challenged second-class citizen or the long-term saviour of debt burdened mobile operators?
The sheer weight of numbers, the emergence of convergent billing and the lure of mobile commerce are about to move the prepaid user to centre stage. Herbert Wright looks at the prepay issues set to change the entire nature of mobile telephony.
The prepaid mobile customer has long been considered the lower end of the market, neither generating high income nor driving key technologies. They may generate higher revenues per minute, cost less to acquire and represent no credit risk, but their ARPU is lower than postpay subscribers and their churn rate generally higher. Yet the rise of the prepaid sector everywhere has been inexorable - over the course of 2000, in the UK alone, the percentage of prepaid customers rose from approximately 50% to 70%.
While estimates vary between surveys, the overall picture is clear. According to the Yankee Group Survey 'Prepaid Cellular in Western Europe: What Lies Ahead?,’ prepaid accounted for 55% of the entire European mobile population in June 2000, with a wide national range, from Finland’s mature, low-tariff market of only 1.4% to Italy at 84% and Portugal on 74%. The Yankee Group also estimates that the prepaid European ARPU is a mere 20-40% of postpaid ARPU, and that ARPU dropped 13% every year over 1996-99, from $71/month to less than $47. For 2000, its ARPU estimates are $42 but only around $21 for prepaid. Clearly, even if postpaid ARPU rises, the flood of low-ARPU prepay will bring the overall figure down.
These trends are reflected globally, with emerging markets like South Africa and Mexico having prepay take-up rates of 70%, and prepay dominating most Asian countries. In the fragmented American market, only a third of cellular users were prepay in 1999, but this is on the rise, indirectly reflected by the Yankee Group’s estimates of under-18 users rising from 5% to 23% from 1999 to 2000. Yet they also estimate that mobile spend on games, graphics, music and video will rise from $41 million in 2000 to $1.13 billion in 2005. In Europe, EHPT, the Ericsson-Hewlett Packard joint venture in telecom applications, has already demonstrated a jukebox activated by mobile credit, specifically identifying the teenage sector as the critical driver for the prepaid market. Samuel Sweet, UK Business Development Director for the project, said in February: “With so much disposable income teenagers are well-positioned to be able to dictate what level of service they receive, how much they pay for it and who bills them for what they buy.”
Beyond the figures and talk lay the challenges to operators of increasing prepay spend through the opportunities that data applications and mobile commerce will open up. As the new technologies kick in, operators’ attitudes are already experiencing a sea-change. In March, UK operators cut the subsidy on handsets to the prepay market, taking the entry level for a new prepay user from about £40 to £70. Behind that is a rising feeling that prepay and postpay should be treated the same. The UK’s only MVNO to date, Virgin Mobile, launched at the end of 1999 with absolutely no distinction between pre and postpay customers.
Steven Day, Virgin Mobile Corporate Affairs Director, explains: “In 1999, we observed the phenomenal rise in prepay. There will come a time when that market will postpay. We said, let's build a proposition that rides that wave of prepay people and is flexible. A customer should not be forced into a line rental - you should be free to choose how you pay.” Bryony Clow, spokesperson for Vodafone UK, stresses that services must appeal to prepay customers: “Lots of effort and resources are being poured into services, such as SMS, improved WAP sites with our 'Find & Search' which will locate banks and restaurants within a few hundred metres over GSM, and text alerts giving share prices or bank balance, for example. There's a lot of good things going on.”
Buzzword
Voice, data, SMS and mobile commerce should soon all be running simultaneously. An industry buzzword to tackle these issues of billing is convergent billing - right now, not even prepay and postpay are always converged. According to Dave Lawson, Director of Logica’s Intelligent Network Business Unit, “the challenges that the operators are facing are similar to when voice services were introduced. Anything other than voice requires an alternative method of accessing a customer's credit - operators are struggling with this dilemma.” His unit has developed Aethos PrePaid, an application currently being used by 35- 40 operators worldwide. As well as handling customer care, voucher management and distribution, security and IVR, it manages the customer's account in real time - decrementing credit, injecting a warning when credit is low, and of course at the appropriate moment cutting the call off. “Real time control is fundamental with the prepaid market. The data element of 3G lends itself to real-time control,” adds Lawson.
Chorleywood Consulting has recognised the challenge of prepay in its report on GPRS and 3G billing. It notes that ‘CAMEL (Customised Application for Mobile Enhanced Logic) phase 3 is required to support full integration of data services (including SMS, GPRS and 3G) into the prepaid voice service with real time charging for roaming users,’ but that ‘it is not clear when GPRS vendors will support GPRS phase 3. The first deployment of CAMEL 3 is likely to be in early 2002. Until then, prepaid GPRS will remain on proprietary platforms.’
Across Asia, Lucent Technologies is also active, integrating its soon-to-be-launched Arbor/BP billing solution with a new Prepay Billing Platform to enable integrated, real-time, convergent prepay and postpay billing. According to Nathan Rae, Technical Marketing Manager, and Abhay Kumar, Director of Product & Offer Marketing at Lucent’s Billing & Customer Care, Asia Pacific & China, this next-generation billing solution offers ‘a single customer data structure for virtually any service, any rate plan, in any market. Prepay and postpay services can co-exist under one account structure, centralising customer care and eliminating the need for multiple call centres. This seamless architecture precludes the need to re-engineer the system with every change in a rate plan or addition of a new service.’
Currently, mobile commerce is at insignificant levels due to the widespread disappointment of WAP and security fears, but this is already changing with mobile browse-and-buy services going online from companies among the likes of Digital Rum with Eircell and AOL, or Payitmobile with Germany’s E-plus. However, Rory McGregor, CEO of Snaz, a provider of mobile commerce solutions enabling wireless transactions, points out that “anybody, including the carrier, will need the customer’s details to execute the transaction.” Portals like Genie and Vizzavi are one stage removed, meaning that the carrier-owned portal doesn’t necessarily have access to customer information and billing. McGregor sees in mobile commerce the chance of “capturing their buying habits, giving you their buying intent,” but is sceptical that transactions would switch from being credit-card based to phone-credit based. “It costs too much. 5-10% of the voucher cost goes to distributors. When you're only going to get 5% from an affiliate deal, it doesn't make sense. It has to be high-margin goods.”
Anonymity
Clearly, operators recognise that prepay anonymity is a major drawback. Vodafone’s Clow says: “We give a cash incentive in the box to register with us - we do encourage our prepaid customers to register. On rare occasions we'll send them an SMS.” Virgin Mobile’s Day claims that anonymous customers amount to “not many - we encourage registration, we don't enforce it.”
According to IDC, mobile commerce in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) will exceed US$36 billion by 2004, with Taiwan and Korea being the biggest markets. You can already order fast food in Singapore using WAP, and in Taiwan buy vouchers giving discounts in shops. This suggests a dream for mobile commerce - the 'digital wallet.’ Lucent’s Rae and Kumar note that “to date, we haven’t seen any of our customers launch this type of service. However we’re sure this will be important soon and again will increase the importance of having a prepay billing system that is very open, flexible and able to process large volumes of transactions.”
Theoretically, a prepaid mobile account means the customer has a mini bank account, with spending power and the hardware to indulge in mobile transactions. The concept of wireless wallets is not revolutionary - we already transact in virtual money every time we use a credit card. Mondex smartcards also enable all sorts of transactions in electronic cash, and global payment network SmartAxis actually demonstrated a transaction over GSM as far back as 1997. But the biggest issue is security. Logica’s Lawson argues that “the place to hold valuable information is not the SIM card. Having those open to attack on thousands, millions of fronts is very worrying. The place [for security] is the network.” He says there are rules you can build for security checks in real time: “If someone wanted to buy an MP3 track for 10p, you could allow that through, but if they wanted to buy an MP3 player you may want to put in more rules for validation. For example, a PIN number for transactions over £50, a credit check for transactions over £150. That's the sort of thing you can do.”
However, Anoop Ubhey of analysts Frost and Sullivan believes that more flexible ‘portable identity modules’ in the form of SIM smart cards in mobile phones are one possible storage container for secret encryption keys and digital certificates, which would provide strong ID on customers for banks and other content providers doing business on the wireless Web. “SIM cards as we know them today will change, and security requirements are massive. The chip manufacturers are placing great importance on security on the micro-controller chips, especially for SIM cards.” Ubhey observes that “security will have to be much better as 3G will be designed to allow users in different networks to communicate with each other. Unlike today's SIM cards used by GSM operators, which verifies that the phone is entitled to use the network, the new SIM will provide for mutual authentication.”
Operators vs banks
Could mobile operators become bankers? Logica’s Lawson observes that “Operators and bankers have been dancing around that question for the last eighteen months. The issues are legislation, and what's the exposure of the operator?” With an e-transaction on the Net, the exposure risk is with the credit card company, but for the operator, the question isn't just monetary - there’s a host of issues such as the operator’s customer care centre handling transactional problems. “Simultaneous use of a credit account is a challenge,” says Lawson. “For example, a consumer wants to use their mobile service to send an SMS message to her friend to check out the name of that track they just heard at a club. Having got the reply they then order the track from the operator’s Web site whilst calling a taxi to get home. All of these transactions are happening simultaneously and all need to verify that there's sufficient credit available when a user is paying via the prepay model. This is a significant technological challenge.”
Frost & Sullivan’s Ubey observes that what technology cannot resolve “is the fact most banking institutions do not want to lose control and branding status. These issues are of utmost importance to banks. A bank will want to stay a card issuer and not become a service provider to a mobile operator.”
For the operators, prepay is no longer a grab-market-volume strategy and the feeling is that payment method is gradually becoming irrelevant. Services beyond 2G are where ARPUs are expected to start climbing, and prepay will reflect that with the rise of convergent billing. Technical questions remain, not least where security should reside for mobile commerce, but when that issue settles the prospect of bankers and operators blurring (or the former becoming MVNOs?) opens up. In the log run, the micropayment market - transactions of less than $10 which according to Visa International amount to $2 trillion in cash globally each year - could migrate to mobile. In the meantime, however, it will be the consumers - and especially the kids - who increasingly drive the prepay market.
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