Whilst prepaid airtime and data can contribute a significant share of VAS revenue, its low margins can be reduced by inefficient routing and failover processes that impact commercials. Electrum’s Prepaid Airtime and Data service provides enhanced load balancing functionality to optimise commercials even more - while maintaining service availability.
According to StatsSA, 91% of South African households exclusively use mobile phones and nearly 73% of households access the internet through them. Consequently, prepaid airtime and data have become an essential value-added service (VAS) over the decades. Retailers and banks have responded to the opportunity by providing multiple channels for consumers to purchase airtime and data.
While profitable, prepaid airtime and data are commoditised, price-sensitive products with low margins. To protect revenue, businesses must negotiate competitive commercials with service providers and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and implement processes to ensure their services are always available for their customers.
Load balancing is the ability to direct transactions to a preferred service provider and is an essential routing feature. Electrum’s Prepaid Airtime and Data solution offers load balancing at two levels - either at the service provider level or at the MNO level.
Banks and retailers partner with multiple service providers as a way to implement failover procedures and maximise availability. Rather than place all their eggs in one basket, weightings to specify traffic route preference are used to enable the business to process more transactions through the service provider that offers the best commercials and success rate - maximising their profitability.
When a preferred service provider experiences issues or cannot process transactions for a certain MNO, the weightings can be adjusted to direct traffic toward alternative service providers. This reduces downtime and limits customer impact.
Service provider-level load balancing ensures availability, but lacks the precision needed to address issues with individual MNOs. The addition of load balancing at an MNO level provides additional, powerful routing control to banks and retailers - allowing you to protect against commercial losses and improve operational efficiency.
Enhanced agility and visibility with MNO-level load balancing
Load balancing at the MNO level gives businesses even greater control by allowing weightings to be adjusted one level further. Instead of affecting all transactions, routing changes can be made only for the impacted MNO traffic through a specific service provider.
This flexible functionality allows businesses to enhance their Prepaid Airtime and Data business in three key ways:
1. Optimising commercials
Commercial agreements with an MNO may be more competitive when they are routed through a specified service provider. MNO load balancing maximises your margins by enabling routing rules based on your commercial preferences.
2. Ensuring high availability
Businesses can isolate the impact of the affected MNO while keeping all other transactions the same. This is achieved by maintaining the flow of healthy MNO traffic through the preferred service provider while rerouting the problematic MNO traffic to an alternative provider. This prevents service downtime and ensures a better experience for consumers - increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Improved control
Real-time MNO-level alerts allow for quicker issue resolution and fewer blind spots. Your teams are easily able to adjust weightings and specify routes to avoid outages. This removes the burden of time-consuming troubleshooting from your team - freeing capacity and allowing rapid response to service availability.
Take control of your commercials and uptime
Electrum’s Prepaid Airtime and Data service provides enterprises with MNO-level load balancing to make every transaction count and keep customers coming back. With the Electrum Console, back-office teams can troubleshoot efficiently using real-time alerts and self-service tools to adjust weightings at any level and as needed.
Our cloud-native solution provides greater oversight of transaction processing health, giving you everything you need to optimise margins and improve your product performance.
Chat with us to learn how Electrum’s Prepaid Airtime and Data service can amplify your VAS business.
