powering the ROC
Fraud Management Success Story at Reliance Communications
“Subex FMS, "o ered a comprehensive suite of automated tools and capabilities for fraud control while also being exible enough to allow the extensive customization required to work within RCOM’s complex IT environment” Ashok N. Shah, Vice President - IT Strategy, Reliance Communications Limited
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About the operator Reliance Communications is the agship company of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) of companies. RCOM is India’s leading integrated telecommunication company with over 48 million customers. The business encompasses a complete range of telecom services covering mobile (on CDMA and GSM platforms) and xed line telephony. It includes broadband, national and international long distance services and data services along with an exhaustive range of value-added services and applications.
Reliance Communications owns and operates the world's largest next generation IP enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 165,000 kilometers of bre optic cable systems in India, USA, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Paci c region.
Rated among "Asia's Top 5 Most Valuable Telecom Companies", Reliance Communications is India's foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider. The company ranks among the Top 10 Asian Telecom companies by number of customers. Reliance Communications’ corporate clientele includes 1850 Indian and multinational corporations, and over 250 global carriers.
The challenge Reliance Communication (RCOM) had been experiencing an explosive growth in its mobile subscriber base – growing by about thirty percent yearon- year. The total subscriber base is around 48 Million (April 2008) with an average load of around 150 million CDRs per day.
The Fraud Management team at RCOM was quite aware of the challenges that accompany such a huge growth. Apart from the challenge of scaling operations and IT systems to meet such growth, they were also aware of the new telecom frauds that can potentially hit their system. Obviously, the team wanted to be ready before any real damage was done.
RCOM’s existing Fraud Management System was not geared to meet such challenges. Moreover RCOM was experiencing a diminishing return from this system. RCOM decided to look for a new FMS when the incumbent vendor could not support the application any longer.
Subex FMS allowed Reliance to set up a controlled structure for Fraud Management.
RCOM’s team had speci c ideas to what they needed from the new system. While they were obviously looking for scalability and addressing new types of frauds, RCOM also wanted an FMS that was exible enough to support the speci c needs of their complex IT environment. RCOM desired a structure where the control is centralized and the contextual access is available both at the central as well as regional users. Also, the system had a number of interfaces unique to RCOM that needed to be provided for.
After an extensive research, Reliance decided to go for Subex‘s Fraud Management System for this strategic project.
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The solution RCOM chose Subex FMS for this project based on its ability to handle new frauds and the inherent scalability of the system. They were also impressed by the automating capabilities in the system and exibility of the system that allowed adapting it to RCOM’s environment.
The implementation was quite a challenging one, particularly due to the geographical spread of RCOM’s fraud management users and a load of data to the tune on 150 Million CDRs per day that is expected to grow even further.
Subex came up with a structure where the data was pooled in from geographically spread access points and the application was hosted across three di erent servers for balancing the load. The availability of a web interface and access de nitions allowed replicating the kind of control structure that RCOM wanted to exercise with the application with remote monitoring of Fraud. The system was exible enough to allow building interface with di erent systems/ applications like mediation and middleware existing in RCOM’s IT environment.
Exposure to RCOM’s complex IT environment was a valuable learning for Subex. This also testi es the exibility and scalability of the system.
To minimize the business impact a phased approach was applied, with the complete functionality delivered over two phases.
SUBEX FMS IN RELIANCE IT ENVIRONMENT
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The bene ts The bene ts to RCOM from this implementation have been manifold. RCOM gained a better control on fraud exposure in their network. One area with signi cant bene ts was the reduced instances of SIM-cloning. Subex FMS performed checks like geographic infeasibility and overlap of calls to identify and disable cloned SIMs in their network.
They also bene ted by preventing the return of con rmed fraudsters to the network through Subex FMS’s advanced subscriber checks. Features like cross- eld, phonetic, sub-string and exact word matches helped to identify and prevent returning fraudsters from re-entering the network.
RCOM was able to take subscriber checks to the next level by using call ngerprinting – a patent pending approach that allows operators to track their repeat fraudster by building their telecom pro le i.e. their pattern of usage that can uniquely identify them, allowing RCOM to proactively identify and terminate such fraudsters even if they gain entry through false information.
Call Fingerprinting – a patent pending Subex approach allowed RCOM to track repeat fraudsters proactively.
RCOM also noticed a substantial improvement in their analysts’ productivity through Subex FMS. A user-friendly raphical user interface for analyzing cases helped the analysts close the cases faster and also resulted in saving labour costs for COM in an environment with an explosive subscriber growth.
Subex FMS also enabled a centralized operation of fraud team with access control available at various o ces geographi- cally dispersed across India – the kind of structure that RCOM wanted to create. The web-based interfaces allowed users to login remotely and monitor the fraud as well.
Overall, RCOM gained a better control of fraud in their network with Subex FMS.
03 © Subex Limited About Subex Subex Limited is a leading global provider of Business Support Systems (BSS) that empowers communications service providers (CSPs) to achieve competitive advantage through Business Optimization - thereby enabling them to improve their operational e ciency to deliver enhanced service experiences to subscribers.
The company pioneered the concept of a Revenue Operations Center (ROC®) – a centralized approach that sustains pro table growth and nancial health through coordinated operational control. Subex's product portfolio powers the ROC and its best-in-class solutions such as revenue assurance, fraud management, credit risk management, cost management, route optimization, data integrity management and interconnect / inter-party settlement.
Subex also o ers a scalable Managed Services program and has been the market leader in Business optimization for four consecutive years according to Analysys Mason (2007, 2008, 2009 & 2010). Business optimisation includes fraud, revenue assurance, analytics, cost management and credit risk management. Subex has been awarded the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Award 2011 along with Swisscom for the industry’s rst successful Risk Reward Sharing model for Fraud Management.
Subex's customers include 16 of top 20 wireless operators worldwide* and 26 of the world’s 50 biggest# telecommunications service providers. The company has more than 300 installations across 70 countries.
*RCR Wireless list, 2010 #Forbes’ Global 2000 list, 2010
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