Convergent Billing Market - Growth, Trends, Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The Convergent Billing Market is expected to register a CAGR of approximately 22% during the forecast period (2020 - 2025). Telecom companies are increasingly embracing digitization in their business environment and are launching innovative services based on IoT, often in collaboration with partners worldwide. Owing to such growing trends, telecom billing systems evolved to play a critical role in facilitating new services based on customer needs and efficient monetization.

Key Highlights

• Convergent billing provides an efficient method to consolidate all billing tasks and leads to enhanced transparency in the billing process. It provides a holistic view of the customer in real-time, which helps create bundling and discounting services, keeping the customers in mind.
• With the increasing technological integration, the complexity of the new service architecture is increasing, due to which the telcos are facing several challenges, such as rapidly dwindling revenues. Hence, the telcos are increasingly focusing on bundled offerings, flexible discounting rules, cross-sell campaigns, and hassle-free customer experience. Hence, the adoption of convergent billing systems increases, as it provides a single-window solution for an operator’s billing requirements and a corporate or enterprises’ bundled offerings.
• With the rollouts of 5G technology globally, the need for convergent billing solutions is increasing, further creating ample opportunities for solution providers to gain market traction. For instance, Huawei recently launched Convergent Billing System (CBS) R20, which was declared the industry’s first-ever 5G SA network-based monetization solution in London. The solution has already been deployed over the stc Kuwait 5G SA’s network, whereas the “Dedicated Access” was offered to enterprises with guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• The COVID-19 crisis had a positive impact on the growth of a few sectors, including IT and telecommunications. The demand for digital services especially has escalated at a high rate in past few months. Nevertheless, the decrease in business activities and manual business operations such as partnerships lead to boost the adoption of convergent billing solutions.

Key Market Trends

Cloud-Based Deployment is Expected to Spur Growth

• The Convergent Billing System has applied the micro-services architecture in the 5G billing field. It complies with the principles of stateless micro-services and separation of data and applications. The balanced design of micro-services enables flexibility and high performance at the same time. The benefit of stateless micro-services and data and application separation, all key applications of the CBS, is a distributed architecture. Multiple instances of a single service can be simultaneously deployed and access to any service instance is identical.
• The new generation of telecom operators is striving to launch and maintain differentiated service capabilities that combine a cloud-based model, communication service integration via API’s and mostly web-based self-care options, with relatively little actual communications infrastructure. Such trends and initiatives are expected to boost the deployment of convergent billing systems in the cloud.
• Billing and CRM integrator, product catalog, rating, invoicing, and bill formatting is being implemented using PaaS because these applications do not require end-user intervention and possess asynchronous background processing capabilities. A cloud-native BSS on the public cloud infrastructure offers maximum benefits at the lowest costs. They provide tools that are vital for increasing and retaining customer base.
• In March 2020, Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) was made available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace - so joint customers can easily deploy the world’s first enterprise data cloud on Microsoft Azure. Additionally, by procuring CDP through the Azure Marketplace, these customers can leverage integrated billing i.e. the cost of CDP will be part of a single Azure bill making procurement simple and friction-free.

North America Expected to Dominate the Market

• The North American region is expected to dominate the Convergent Billing Market owing to its dominance in the technology landscape. The technological landscape is radically changing in various industries due to which there has been an increased demand for connected devices.
• Amdocs RevenueONE is a cloud-native, open agile solution for monetising 5G services, IoT and smart spaces, the digital ecosystem and the subscription economy. It includes the 5G-ready convergent charging, with network slicing support, service-based interfaces and a distributed architecture. RevenueONE provides omni-convergent charging for all consumer and enterprise business models and IoT.
• Beesion, a low-code telecom software provider, announced the go-live of a major BSS transformation program at a multi-network service provider in Panama, a subsidiary of one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world with a dominating presence across the Americas.
• Customer Realtionship management is also gaining pace in the region. This is driven by the increasing digitalization of enterprises across the industry verticals and penetration of cloud technology and various service models.

Competitive Landscape

The competitive landscape of the Convergent Billing Market is expected to move towards fragmentation owing to the presence and emergence of several market players globally. The solution providers are innovating to launch advanced solutions in the market to gain maximum traction. Also, various organizations in the market are collaborating with the solution providers to stimulate the adoption of these solutions.

• October 2020 - SAP launched SAP Convergent Charging 2020 FPS, a UX renovation to provide a best-in-class, consistent, and modern user experience to its customers through the adoption of the SAP Fiori user experience design. They especially now delivered the long-awaited ability for pricing specialists to quickly configure basic rate plans including usage and recurring charges with a top-down approach.
• June 2020- Tridens known for its innovative cloud-based Monetization platform, consulting, and software engineering services to enterprises announced it had entered a partnership with Congero Technology Group, Maribor, Slovenia that will help bring Tridens to a position to attract and support more business partners in the North American market and help Congero in obtaining customers in the European market.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support