ACL Success Story – Telecommunications – MTN Nigeria

 2011-05-01

MTN Nigeria

“ACL has remarkably improved revenue assurance, reconciliation, audit and investigation activities. Our team has been able to meet expectations within a tight budget and a competitive market.”

Adewusi Adebola, Telecom Analytics Manager, MTN Nigeria

With increasingly lower customer rates, the Nigerian telecommunications market is a place of tight profit margins and stiff competition. Surviving in this lean business environment requires organisations to find new ways to boost earnings, reduce costs and plug revenue leakages. MTN Nigeria’s Revenue Assurance (RA) department implemented ACL to monitor areas of potential leakage and fraud, which drastically improved data coverage within a tight personnel budget. The solution took just 28 days to deploy – from conception through to full implementation. Most dramatically, ACL enabled MTN Nigeria to recover significant revenues in just one year.

Continuous monitoring without higher costs

Despite the RA team’s commitment to reduce costs, sources of revenue leakages can be difficult to identify and complicated to resolve. The process also requires expensive human resources. High-risk areas predictably received the most attention, while lower-risk sectors were covered by random sampling – opening the door to preventable leakage problems.

The RA unit selected ACL Audit Analytics for its ease of use, accuracy, processing speed and output quality. Staff quickly developed a series of applications, based on the RA coverage map, to monitor areas of potential leakage and fraud, including core network (switch file generation and HLR); prepaid sub-system and billing; post-paid billing; interconnect mediation and billing; roaming and cash to service. The ACL solution continuously monitors all revenue-impacting systems, providing exception reports and providing RA with critical information about the function and efficacy of these systems.

Complete visibility for dramatic revenue savings

Before implementing ACL, the RA relied entirely on random sampling and prepared reports from the enterprise data warehouse system. Coverage of key risk areas totaled less than five percent of the transactions. Today, the team has a full view of the entire network. The prepaid platform represents over 90 percent of MTN Nigeria’s revenue, and now the company enjoys nearly 100 percent visibility of subscriber account transactions.

ACL has enabled RA to perform its reconciliation, audit and investigation activities with a quick reaction time and a tight personnel budget. Most importantly, the organisation has saved over £37 million in potential revenue leakages within a single year of deploying the ACL solution. Problems that previously went unchecked are now highlighted in mere minutes and all risk areas can be covered with confidence and accuracy.

Outlook

MTN Nigeria chose ACL because it needed a software that was scalable and flexible enough to provide an effective way to identify revenue leakage and potential fraud in an accurate and timely manner.

The company required a solution that would streamline audit processes and reconciliation activities and guarantee effective identification of controls weakness.

ACL has become a solution of choice for carrying different reconciliation activities across many units apart from revenue assurance.

Due to increasing product and system deployment, there has been a need for effective monitoring and assurance within a limited budget.

MTN Nigeria’s future plan is to effectively use data analytics technology to apply continuous auditing measures and maximise the benefits of ACL’s Server processing and automatic task scheduling.