Smart.Net Implements Robust Billing Solution to Support Advanced Smartcard Services
Small Payments, Huge Volumes
Smart.Net is a leader in the Brazilian benefit card processing industry, specializing in intelligent solutions for micro-payments. Founded in 1998, the company processes large volumes of small value transactions.
Currently operating in 1,200 cities and in every state in Brazil, Smart.Net has over 100,000 merchants and 12,500 self-service benefit stations. Smart.Net supports more than four million active smartcards that annually conduct 600 million payment transactions.
The Need: Go from Paper to Smartcard
Every payday, according to government regulations, Brazilian employers must distribute social benefits, such as transportation and meal credits to their employees. Until recently, the distribution process had been conducted primarily by paper vouchers – an especially large undertaking for Latin America's largest country in area and population.
Smart.Net developed a sophisticated smartcard solution to answer these emerging market needs based on the concept of offline payment transactions. The solution has proven to be so effective and successful that it led Smart.Net to sign contracts with Sodexho and VR -- two of the major players in the market -- and positioned Smart.Net as the leader in benefit card processing, supporting over 600 million payment transactions annually.
Meeting these automation demands required Smart.Net to implement a billing solution capable of supporting multiple types of rapidly changing products and services, while ensuring transaction integrity and security. To achieve the highest efficiency while ensuring proper management of financial information and services, Smart.Net needed an open platform with proven capabilities for superior deployment and integration flexibility.
The Challenge: Achieve Fast Rollout with Transaction Integrity
A payment-processing infrastructure plays a critical role in providing the agility required for rolling out new smartcard products and services. In searching for an infrastructure robust enough to support a huge volume of transactions with the necessary flexibility, Smart.Net looked for a platform offering:
- Low total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Fast time-to-market for new products and services
- Cost-effective management of multiple card issuers and sales channels
The Answer: A Field-Proven, Flexible Billing Solution
Smart.Net selected and implemented the Comverse Kenan FX customer care, ordering and billing solution with its powerful billing engine and advanced set of customer lifecycle management capabilites.
The Kenan FX solution integrated easily with Smart.Net's CRM, ERP and underlying transaction-collection engine systems, while requiring minimal customizations. Currently, Kenan FX is being used to rate and invoice for registered retail stores as well as for direct and indirect outlets, such as human resources departments and issuers using Smart.Net's technology solution.
In addition to supporting actual payments at retail stores, the Kenan FX solution bills and settles additional services. For example, the solution handles monthly fees for recharging benefit cards at ATM-like stations (installed at both public and company sites that provide employee benefits), as well as services ordered by retail stores for their smartcard terminals.
Why Selected: Supports Today’s and Tomorrow’s Requirements
Smart.Net chose Comverse’s billing and customer care solution to cover complex commissioning scenarios among issuers and retailers that use its smartcards as a payment method. In the past, Smart.Net used products derived from the financial industry. In addition to being overly complex and requiring major customization, these products slowed time-to-market and raised cost of ownership. By using the Comverse solution, Smart.Net was assured of lower risk in deployment and operation.
Comverse’s Kenan FX billing platform has been deployed extensively in the telecom and ecommerce arenas worldwide, where it provides mission-critical transaction processing solutions for a wide variety of service providers. Optimized for the converging communications market, Comverse Billing Solutions provide an advanced set of real-time customer management solutions from customer self-service, ordering and activation, through real-time charging and payments. Comverse Billing Solutions have delivered impressive ROI to clients.
The Results: Bottom-Line Benefits
By implementing Comverse Kenan FX, Smart.Net achieved a number of significant quantitative benefits:
- Fewer Service Calls: Smart.Net experienced a 10% reduction in the number of calls into the service center regarding invoice questions, leading to lower operating expenses. This reflects a higher level of customer satisfaction resulting from the timely generation of more detailed and accurate bills.
- Lower Processing Costs: The implementation has yielded a more visible and streamlined process, resulting in a reduction of losses in the processing, payment and settlement of bills. Estimated savings are approximately15% of processing costs.
- Reduced Incorrect Payments and Subsequent Reversals: The ability to perform anticipated quality checks on the bills, through the solution's pro-forma mechanism, significantly reduces the probability of incorrect payments and future reversals. In addition, time for payment and reconciliation was reduced from one to two days to merely one hour.
- Decreased Processing Times: Processing times have been reduced by a factor of 12 (reduced from 24 to 2 hours), resulting in far more efficient technical operations.
Improved Scalability: The billing infrastructure can now support large transaction volume growth (expected around 100%) without significant hardware upgrades.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Customer complaints have been reduced by 50%