Subex Limited, a leading provider of Operations and Business Support Systems (OSS / BSS) for communications service providers (CSPs) recently presented ideas for extracting the maximum efficiency from existing fraud management investments by CSPs, at the GSMA Fraud Forum held at Ascot, London, UK between January 26-28, 2010. At this forum, Subex presented on ‘Sweating the asset: How to get more from your fraud management system’.

Sharon Samuel, Business Consultant and Subject Matter Expert on Fraud Management for Europe, Middle East and Africa, at Subex, spoke on efficient use of fraud management investments for maximum impact. A considerable amount of effort is required to detect and manage fraud incidents. Therefore, one way to maximize the investment in your fraud detection capabilities is to look at the efficiency of your operations. Not everything that claims to be efficient might indeed be so; after all, efficiency is about maximizing output with the same level of input or minimizing input for a constant output level. Hence, it is important to consider the performance of the fraud management solution, ruling accuracy of fraud analysts and quantitatively measuring the performance of the fraud management team to arrive at the ‘actual’ efficiency of the system. Most CSPs ignore the ‘people’ aspect of fraud management, a key contributor to its overall efficiency.

“To derive maximum benefits from a fraud management solution, one needs to ‘sweat it out’ to perform to its maximum limits”, said Sharon Samuel.

Sweating the fraud management solution thus aims at maximizing its ROI by doing more with what’s available. For example, finding more fraud and finding it faster. Perhaps managing non-subscriber related fraud and most importantly extending the scope of the solution to include potentially unaddressed, high value areas of internal fraud such as expense fraud, handset theft, internal telephony abuse, etc.

The same fraud management solution can be used to identify certain types of high level revenue assurance and credit risk management issues. The solution can even identify and detect unusual patterns caused by equipment or network related faults. Additionally, it can offer third party fraud detection services to other service providers, or corporate customers or consumers, delivering another value add to a CSP’s service offering.

Sharon sums it up by saying, “In an era of increasing pressure on margins, sweating the fraud management asset can contribute and add a few more basis points to the organization’s profitability”.

To discuss more about improving the effectiveness of your fraud detection operations, please contact Harshita Nair at [email protected]