EU Roaming ... but what about the fraud?

The EU has finally bitten the bullet today and announced it will introduce measures that will slash the cost of sending a text while abroad and reform the way phone operators charge for data calls made when customers roam.

For the subscriber, this is clearly great news. But for the operators? What does it mean?

Well, if you look at the issue of roaming fraud, it soon becomes clear that squeezing the margins on roaming could have a significant impact. Roaming fraud represents one of the most prevalent forms of revenue leakage for mobile operators today. A constantly growing and mobile population of subscribers is incurring losses for operators largely down to outdated roaming processes. A ccording to a GSMA survey in 2007, operators are routinely suffering losses in the region of EURO11.1 million over a two-year period, making it a very real threat to an operator’s bottom line.

A retail cap of €0.11 per roamed text message (down from an average of €0.29) on the 2.5 billion text messages sent every year by roaming customers in the EU is bad enough. Add to that the wholesale cap of €1 per megabyte of roamed data also announced and it’s clear that operators need to get their houses in order and put in place the revenue assurance systems that will enable to them to wring every last cent out before the revenue stream is throttled.