Lebara Mobile Chooses Aricent Group for Revenue Assurance in Seven Countries

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS -- The Aricent Group, a global innovation and technology services company, announced that it has completed an eight-week mediation and revenue assurance implementation for MVNO Lebara Mobile, one of the world's fastest growing mobile companies with more than 3 million customers. The multi-country solution has ended revenue leakage and reduced operating expenditure through a more agile and responsive IT infrastructure.

With a multi-operator, multi-vendor environment across seven countries, Lebara Mobile faced major challenges in accessing reliable, actionable data for monitoring and charging of services. This was particularly difficult in countries where they did not have their own Intelligent Network systems within the operator environment. This negatively impacted Lebara Mobile's ability to manage the whole end-to-end revenue chain from retail rating and charging through to wholesale settlement.

Aricent implemented an integrated solution, combining its own frameworks with partner solutions to improve revenue management, streamline rating and mediation in order to create a reliable, scalable BSS environment. The new environment centrally automates rating of call data records (CDRs) per subscriber rate plans from across all seven countries, while interfacing with network elements for CDR collection and the business applications database.

"Revenue assurance is a major challenge for MVNOs," said Neeraj Vyas, Vice President, Carrier Services & Solutions, Aricent Group. "Estimates put revenue leakage between five and 15 percent of total revenue. As many MVNOs operate on tight profit margins, the right revenue assurance and BSS infrastructure can mean the difference between growth and stagnation. Lebara has built an extremely strong platform for future growth and prosperity with a system that will improve profits and streamline their business operations."

"Revenue leakage can happen for several reasons and can touch many functions," said Shyam Mardikar, Chief Technology Officer at Lebara. "We needed a partner that had strong expertise in this field and exceptional experience in the telecom industry in general. Aricent has been a great fit for us. With Aricent's revenue assurance solution we can trace every single call from origin to destination, giving us a clearer view of our network and business than we have ever had."

Lebara's consumer offerings include pay-as-you-go or pay-monthly options, data services, handsets, and secure money products. Additionally, Lebara delivers specialized customer service from its London-based call center, which handles over four million calls each year, supporting 25 languages.

About Lebara                                                        

Lebara is one of Europe's leading telecoms operators, enhancing the lives of migrant communities by providing high quality and low cost international mobile products and services. Lebara provides Pay As you Go and Pay Monthly mobile SIM cards and related services customized to serve the migrant communities in seven European countries as well as Australia. In March 2011, it expanded its services by launching Lebara Money in the UK, a simple and secure MasterCard® prepaid card, offering highly competitive exchange rates and no transfer fees for customers wishing to send money abroad.

In FY2010, Lebara turned in revenues of €565m (- more than a 50% increase on FY09), and profits before tax of €21m (- a 139% rise on FY09). The company currently employs some 1,400 employees across its operations and markets.

In March 2011 the company maintained its position as the UK's leading MVNO, when it received awards for best Mobile Virtual Network Operator and Best Customer Service at this year's Mobile News Awards and more recently, the company picked up two new Customer Service Awards: best UK Customer Experience in Telecom Sector and best UK Customer Experience Team at the UK Customer Experience Awards.

Lebara's CEO Yoganathan Ratheesan won the Asian Business Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2010. Lebara has most recently been awarded the 2011 Ruban D'Honneur, which recognizes 100 European companies that demonstrate excellence, innovation and best practice in their industry.

About the Aricent Group

The Aricent Group is a global innovation and technology services company that helps clients imagine, commercialize, and evolve products and services for the connected world. Bringing together the communications technology expertise of Aricent with the creative vision and user experience prowess of frog, the Aricent Group provides a unique portfolio of innovation capabilities that seamlessly combines consumer insights, strategy, design, software engineering, and systems integration. The client base includes communications service providers, equipment manufacturers, independent software vendors, device makers, and many other Fortune 500 brands. The company's investors are Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Sequoia Capital, The Family Office, Delta Partners, and The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board.

For more information, please visit http://www.aricent.com

Follow the Aricent Group on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/aricent

For further information, contact:

SOURCE Aricent Group