The challenge

The number of customers that subscribe to prepaid services is growing continuously. The volume of customers and the prepaid revenues generated often hard to monitor and manage create a number of security and logistic concerns for the mobile network operators.

One critical area is the management of prepaid vouchers, or recharge cards; another is the management of customer identity cards used for electronic recharge. Ensuring a constant flow in the recharge process also increases the importance of in-time delivery and wide availability of the vouchers. In addition to recharge operations, customers expect specific bonuses depending on the amount they are willing to spend per recharge voucher.

Historically, prepaid billing platform vendors, who concentrate on the telephony and billing aspects of the service, have introduced voucher management systems, recharge bonus management systems, and electronic recharge or credit transfer capabilities. Most voucher solutions support only basic requirements and have evolved very little recently. However, prepaid services have changed substantially in recent years. Changes include:

• Huge increases in voucher volumes
• Increased voucher attractiveness to fraudsters
• Increased complexity of voucher processes
• Mobile network operators’ continual upgrade of service platforms often to new vendors
• Developing logistics costs and resources for prepaid recharge
• Higher systems integration requirements
• Movement toward ‘virtual’ or electronic vouchers
• Shift towards credit transfer between two or more customers

The solution

InTelestage™ Recharge Management Solution is an advanced voucher management system for prepaid mobile services developed by Business Logic Systems. It comprises: Recharge Optimiser, Voucher Manager and Street Vendor.

Recharge Optimiser is a powerful graphical user interface for very particular loyalty schemes definitions, developed to define a limited set of offer groups in a faster way.

Voucher Manager is a state-of-the-art platform-independent voucher administration solution for prepaid services in the mobile environment.

Street Vendor is an advanced On-the-Air recharging models, which can be configured for deployment in any combination.

The Recharge Management Solution is platform-independent and easily customised to meet a mobile operator’s individual voucher processes. The recharge operations are managed and monitored from end-to-end.


Key Features

• End-to-end voucher and loyalty campaigns management.
• Individual voucher processes and tracking
• Highly secure system to protect against internal and external fraud
• Scalable and open system architecture.
• Flexible process/product configuration and serial numbering
• Easy administration use, control and reporting
• Intuitive graphic user interface
• Leading database and development technology
• Rapid, cost-effective On-the-Air recharging solution
• Secure distributor top up
• Advanced account control capabilities
• Widespread distribution network, without the need for physical vouchers or shops
• Appointment of distributors who in turn can re-sell and transfer credit or services to any prepaid subscriber within the network
• Quality service to customers who now can buy recharges or share the value on their prepaid purse or postpaid account without having to locate a reseller
• Access to full reports on transaction activity
• Multiple targeted campaigns simultaneously, dynamic interactive notifications to subscribers throughout promotions, customer rewards based on recharge events, customer lifetime value extension, multi-currency, multi-language features included

The solution is designed to interface with existing network infrastructure such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, data warehouses and CRM systems through standard or customized interfaces.

Voucher Manager includes the generation and management of physical vouchers. The advanced encryption and monitoring capabilities keep the entire process safe and easy to administer.

The functionality of Street Vendor comprises three recharge models, namely:

• The Free-4-All recharge model
• The Closed recharge model
• The Distributor recharge model

All three models make it possible to set all configuration parameters for one or more operators, allowing a single implementation of Street Vendor to support multiple operators sharing the same IN platform and/or billing platform.

Although Street Vendor can operate as a stand-alone solution, a set of integration features is included for direct integration with InTelestage Recharge Optimiser. These include:

• The capability of InTelestage™ Recharge Optimiser to use recharges based on the Free-4-All or Closed recharge models as the basis for loyalty schemes (number of transactions and/or value).
• The capacity of InTelestage™ Recharge Optimiser to use payments, downlink recharges and consumer recharges in the Distributor recharge model as the basis for loyalty schemes (number of transactions and value).

InTelestage™ Recharge Optimiser can issue rewards to a distributor or reseller’s account instead of issuing them to the generic Prepaid Purse.


The Business Logic Advantage

Mobile operators choose Business Logic Systems for their recharge and loyalty management needs because:

• Our clients are up and running in just a few months, not years
• Of our interoperability with existing applications
• We manage the interface between multiple communication gateways (MMS, SMS, email, call centre etc), in recognition that subscribers have different preferred communication channels
• We can connect the operator's communication channels to their billing platform to create an automated reward and bonus fulfilment mechanism (i.e. creating a new sales channel)
• We are experts at handling huge volumes of data - essential when handling real-time behavioural data
• We provide all of the underlying technology, products or solutions
• We are experts specifically in the telecoms market