Catalyst Team The work of the Billing Hub Catalyst team is made possible by the strong support of our industry champions, Verizon Wireless, Botswana Telecommunications Corporation, Etisalat UAE, and Telecom Egypt. Our champions provide compelling challenges that ground our solution in relevant, real-world business scenarios they’ve encountered, ensuring that the Billing Hub is both timely and directly applicable to current trends in the CSP market. Participants include a diverse range of enterprise architects, system integrators and technology experts representing Tata Consultancy Services, Wavelo, i2i, Evergent, and Infosys. Together with the Billing Hub champions, our team meets three times weekly for active technical solutioning, problem-solving, and design analysis in parallel to ongoing technical development. A collaborative spirit and innovation are at the heart of the Billing Hub group, both integral ideals to the open communication of our team. For the Billing Hub demonstration, the team has divided the technological development into five major components for proof-of-concept: * CSP Role: Delivers end-to-end visibility, efficient order processing and event creation through Wavelo's integration. * Partner vendor role: Integrates partner offerings through customerBill events; fetches CSP productOrderEvents for real-time billing synchronization, ensuring seamless integration through Evergent's expertise. * Event management hub: Orchestrates event flow, ensuring seamless communication, facilitated by i2i. * Billing Hub framework: At the core, the framework empowers seamless integration and complex billing handling, driven by Infosys. * Design & Documentation: Interface designs and the documentation to support the participants is owned by TCS. Storyline & Solution The telecommunications industry is increasingly moving toward bundled services that involve multiple vendors, increasing the customer demand for flexible, personalized and convenient one-stop-shop service packages. The Billing Hub Catalyst addresses the challenges and complexities inherent in the billing processes involved in such bundled services between one or more partner vendors. Typically, the responsibility of billing for vendor products falls to the Communications Service Provider (CSP), though vendors may have their own native billing capabilities. This scenario often can lead to: * Limitations in product and service offerings as CSPs are unable to support the full range of pricing models through partner vendors, resulting in a suboptimal solution offered to the customer * Additional operational complexities for CSPs during the billing of vendor products and reconciliation of post-billing issues * Data synchronization challenges, resulting in billing issues for the customer since billing is based on the CSP-managed profile rather than the actual services provisioned by vendor * Disappointing customer experience due to routing through multiple portals, with all orders impacting the bill flowing through the CSP The Billing Hub will create a new billing integration framework allowing vendors to bill for their products with all native partner billing & charging capabilities, all while seamlessly integrating the vendor bill and CSP bill into a single bill to the customer. The framework benefits both vendors and CSPs by streamlining billing & revenue-sharing processes. Additional benefits filter to customers, who will receive more accurate and timely bills, and CSPs, now given the flexibility to offer a broader range of products and services, to delight telecom customers. The framework will be a plug and play solution that enables the integration of invoices generated under complex billing models with usage ratings, tiered pricing models, and cross-company/cross-currency discounting. For vendors, this will provide ease of integration and the ability to deliver new solutions to CSPs quickly. The framework will also simplify and automate settlement flows between vendors and CSPs. This reduces the operational complexity of billing, allowing CSPs to deliver an exceptional and intuitive customer experience supported by a broad service ecosystem.