On the heels of the recent Revenue and Billing Management Report, Finextra and Oracle held a breakfast roundtable with senior bankers at this year’s Sibos to discuss the real world experiences when dealing with the complex and changing world of revenue and billing management.

In addition to representatives from Oracle, the roundtable was attended by representatives from Lloyds Banking Group, Commerzbank and Barclays Africa.

Several themes emerged from the roundtable, which complimented the findings from the survey report. Those themes included:

• A request from corporates for predictive billing, similar to what is offered from the telcos industry, for budgeting purpose.
• In addition to predictive billing, a need to provide daily billing reports and even real-time payments was seen as a priority ‘value-add’ for corporate clients in order to have a constant handle on profit and loss and cash management.
• Also influenced by the telcos market ‘bundling’ or packaging services into one, often discounted bill, figured high in discussion on trends in the industry.  
• Centralised management of billing giving an overall view of the customer, as opposed to product-based billing, also featured heavily.

In essence, the need to see billing and revenue management as not just a process, but instead to focus on the relationships with individual customers and the value adds. To quote one bank representative: “Billing is a relationship with the customer for mutual revenue.”

During the Sibos roundtable, many expressed frustration at the complexities that arise when viewing customers in a segmented way, rather than a holistic way.

The banks continued by saying that they are seeing a shift towards a lot more “centralised management”. Where isolation in billing used to be commonplace, financial services are looking to copy the retail world by offering discounts, packages and central oversight.

The need for real-time and accurate data

Most banks at the Sibos roundtable commented on the need to provide corporates with real-time billing reports.

While many corporates are requesting real-time billing to get a more accurate view of their P&L, many banks are looking towards real-time as a way to alert the billing team of potential problems at their customer’s back office.

The prevailing consensus of the Sibos roundtable looking at billing and revenue management was that billing and charging should not be a “big deal”. If billing is seen as “difficult” or becomes the bulk of the revenue process “That causes problems,” commented one bank.

Payments are seen as something both the bank and the customer ‘have to do’. So any differentiator within the billing and revenue process will always revolve around the “value-adds” conceded the roundtable participants.

Download the Billing and Revenue Management Report now.