Financial Risk Management for the Telecommunication Industry RiskShield: Real-Time, AI-Based Software Solution Enabling Communication Service Providers To Successfully Manage Risk and Fight Fraud

RiskShield Risk Scoring & Advanced Solvency Checks prevents bad debt and helps fight subscription fraud. Cumulative risk scores can be calculated by CSPs based on customer, rate plan and communication device. A continuous subscriber risk analysis is executed using behavioral scoring, and the overall risk scoring process is optimized.

RiskShield’s support does not end at the onboarding process. It is important to continually monitor behavior after customer acceptance:

• Continual analysis of current credit score limits;
• Evaluation of current customer segments and opportunities to enhance new segmentation definitions
• Understand and analyze how changes in the existing and potential scenarios of credit rules would impact the Customer Lifetime Value.

RiskShield offers a wide range of scorecard mechanisms using advanced techniques, such as fuzzy logic decision-making and intelligent scoring algorithms. For every new application request, for example a subscription to a plan and a contract for a mobile device, RiskShield will calculate a total risk score within milliseconds based on multiple criteria using various data feeds from internal and external sources. Based on its real-time risk assessment, RiskShield can make rapid decisions and provides an orchestration of the risk management process.

One main concern for CSPs is fraud committed using credit cards, debit or pre-paid cards. CSPs are very exposed to payment fraud as the number of digital payments and online transactions increase. RiskShield uses a unique combination of smart Hybrid AI technology to decide when strong customer authentication needs to be enforced or when it can be omitted. Under certain circumstances, the system can suggest to deny the transaction, for example when a card has been used fraudulently before. The real-time risk assessment delivered by RiskShield is executed in milliseconds.

Being part of the order-to-payment process, risk evaluation reduces unnecessary friction during the sales process. RiskShield protects CSPs against payment fraud, losses and brand damage, and at the same time, provides a better and frictionless shopping experience to the customers. The software uses an integrated approach across multiple channels and payment methods, hence improving detection and customer experience.

RiskShield provides numerous benefits, including:

• Reduction of revenue lost to fraud
• Reduction of chargebacks
• Easier chargeback reviews
• Reduction of manual reviews
• Reduction of false positives
• Reduction of friction and legitimate orders being blocked

RiskShield helps CSPs efficiently manage the collection process in a coherent manner according to defined rules. These rules are flexible and can be changed dynamically, in line with the behavior of customers, through the effective use of real-time technology and Hybrid AI.

When customers fail to meet their obligations to pay invoices, RiskShield helps CSPs take automatic and effective decisions. It provides powerful strategies that are applied according to specific customer risk profiles. Through RiskShield's Dynamic Profile functionality, these strategies are automatically adapted according to the customers' behavior throughout their life cycles when using the CSP's services and products (fixed, mobile, internet, TV) as well as their ability to meet financial obligations. RiskShield allows for the creation of customer credit history and dynamically adapts the specific credit limits.

By entering into the process of recovering the amounts owed, RiskShield takes action with customers in order to obtain payment, such as: sending SMS and letters, diverting calls to the call center, partially blocking services, etc. As a last resort in the invoice payment recovery process, RiskShield also allows the CSP to effectively and automatically manage customer lists to be sent to the external collection agencies, monitor the results and, finally, recover bad debt and re-activate customer services or proceed to legal actions.

Whether from a CSP or dealer store, E-commerce channel or call center, RiskShield can assess new applications for services in real-time and provide rapid responses. Its unique risk classification capabilities provide CSPs with more flexibility when it comes to accepting and declining new subscriptions.

Suspicious or risky applications do not need to be immediately rejected, but instead an "Initial Best Offer" can be proposed based on the dynamic risk classification score from RiskShield. This helps provide a necessary balance between the desire to increase the customer base and the avoidance of onboarding fraudulent customers.

RiskShield's advanced rules sets combined with internal and external data help CSPs identify subscription fraud both from individuals and entities. RiskShield Machine Learning allows users to store and utilize all the decisions made in the past and build models based on those behaviors. This combination of rule-based intelligence and machine learning is what forms the Hybrid AI approach.

Subscription fraud is a root cause of "First Payment Default" or "Never Paid" cases. Therefore, preventing subscription fraud will help reduce these types of cases and overall bad debt.

The number of mobile money accounts and associated transactions are on the rise. What makes mobile money unique is the fact that no bank account or service from a traditional financial institution is required to manage funds and execute transactions. Money is simply attributed to a phone number and can be stored in a mobile wallet.

As with traditional financial institutions, companies offering these mobile money services must be able to ensure the safety of every payment and transaction. There are numerous risk factors to consider including anonymity, fraudulent transactions, transaction speed and an overall lack of oversight, especially with the continued influx of new market players. To address these challenges, mobile money providers can rely on decades of experience in the payments space that have been built into the RiskShield mobile money risk prevention solution.

RiskShield's unique detection technology is specifically developed to support faster payment environments with real-time decisions, thus offering competitive advantages to mobile money providers, their agents as well as end customers.

Furthermore, with RiskShield, customers and agents can be efficiently screened in real-time based on numerous indicators to estimate the risk each entity poses to the mobile money provider.

Losing customers is a significant risk. Competition amongst telecommunication companies is fierce. It may take just one bad experience with a provider for a customer to browse the latest offer from a competitor. It is therefore essential to holistically monitor customer experience and satisfaction. Numerous scoring techniques are used to determine customer satisfaction levels. What is often missing is a structured action plan once these scores have been determined. In the case of telecommunication services, time is money, as a switch to a different service provider is just a few clicks away. Therefore, real-time action is required.

RiskShield offers a single digital decision-making platform that can combine data from a wide array of sources and creates a unique view on customer satisfaction. Customer experience managers are empowered with both an all-encompassing score as well as automated processes to help define specific actions for individual customers.

RiskShield's power and flexibility is developed using a combination of the most modern techniques. Fuzzy logic and real-time profiling produce a flexible and agile rules engine. A knowledge-based approach allows customer experience experts to include their knowledge in the rules engine. RiskShield also implements machine learning to, for example, predict customer churn.