SUCCESS STORIES / IT Agility

Blockchain serves as the steppingstone to achieve smart intercarrier billing settlements

How Prodapt’s blockchain-based solution helped a North American service provider achieve a dramatic reduction in intercarrier disputes, time savings and cost reduction

Background

Network operators worldwide enter into connectivity agreements to extend their reach to serve their customers better. Due to a huge number of network operators globally and ever-increasing transactions between them, the volume and complexity of cross-charging and settlements are growing exponentially.

Typically, wholesale contracts between network operators contribute 30% to 40% of their business. In such a scenario, billing disputes and blocked revenues can dampen profit margins, and it takes several months to resolve.

What should network operators do to resolve billing disputes to save time and money?

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60% reduction in the settlement time

30% reduction in the average claims

96% achievement of SLA targets

Client Situation

A leading communications giant in North America was facing such a challenge. Their conventional intercarrier billing settlement process had several complexities and inefficiencies. They had incurred huge costs on dispute settlement to fix data errors and reconciliation of their records, which impacted their contractual revenues. Approximately 30% of invoices were getting blocked every month due to disputes.

The client was looking for a partner capable of making the dispute settlement process more robust, efficient, error-free, and faster to improve their revenue. 

Blockchain became an archetype solution to address the client’s intercarrier billing disputes

Diagnosis

Their approach to dispute resolution seemed cumbersome, time-consuming, and error prone. Multiple handoffs, manual dispute audits, and manual claim tracking took considerable time and effort towards resolution. More than 30% of invoices were flagged for third-party audits every month.

There was a lack of data transparency among the service providers, as they were using a centralized database to store all their transactional data. Besides, they depended on intermediaries for settlements, which had security risks.

Solving It

Prodapt introduced blockchain-based smart contracts to provide a single source of truth and establish digital trust in partnerships. Our blockchain ledger solution with its immutable datastore enabled the client to securely manage their billing disputes and complaints.

We enabled interactions between partners using Hyperledger peer-to-peer network, automated the flagging of invoices for audits, and validated tax exemptions. We decreased the overall costs by eliminating manual efforts. The dependency on intermediaries such as clearinghouses was also reduced using a robust, near real-time, and undisputable reconciliation and settlement process.

The client reduced the settlement time by 60% and the current average claim age by 30%. The automation of claim tracking helped the client achieve 95%+ SLA targets.

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