HVN,
The reasoning behind the LTBG purchase of Coral Systems was more related to the fraud solution that Coral had to offer. While LTBG has an acquisition fraud prevention solution, they did not possess the ability to detect fraud on the carrier's current subscriber base (post acquisition). This type of fraud solution requires a knowledge-based data profiling system that can interface directly with the carrier switches. This was a major gap in LTBG's ability to offer a complete end-to-end fraud solution to the carriers.
As for churn management, the Coral "ChurnAlert" and the LTBG "ChurnProphet" products are very similar and actually have extensive overlap. It will be interesting to see how they treat this overlap. It appears that they have three options as it relates to these products. Will they forsake one product for the other? Will they integrate the two products together to create a third feature-rich product? Or, will they continue to market two separate systems to the marketplace?
As for what LTBG is offering in Europe, I have only seen the LTBG system being trialed and offered vs. the Coral system. It does not appear that an integrated marketing strategy has been published. Does anyone here have a clue?
As for fraud,while it does appear that cloning fraud will be much more difficult in authentication capable markets, the fraudsters will move to other areas such as Subscription Fraud, Over-The-Air Activation Fraud, and Network Hacking Fraud in order to continue to steal wireless services. Where authentication capable handsets have been deployed, I am already seeing a large increase in these types of fraud. While the industry has turned the corner on fraud, it still has a long way to go in providing a secure environment for it's services. Also, don't forget about those 30 plus million analog handsets that are still in the subscriber base today. It will take a few more years for the carriers to coax the customer base away from these phones.
Regards,
Crash |
