Interview: 2023 Strategic Alignment with Our Leadership

We’ve been quite successful in the Middle East and Africa in the last few years, because our product suite is tailored to the requirements of these markets. The demand for digital distribution in telecom is going to trickle into 2023 and beyond, but it also shows clear signs of growing in markets like APAC and Latin America. It’s mostly going to be a matter of matching our product mix to the needs of these predominant regions.

I don’t see too much of a deviation from our traditional markets like the Middle East and Africa, where we have had the largest concentration of our customers but I see more potential in SouthEast Asia. Over the coming years, we see consolidation in the Middle East and Africa, with new and existing customers, who can tap into our new product portfolio. There have been a few odd opportunities that we might tap into the Latin American region but I see us making a more concentrated effort on expanding in this region a bit later on.

The way I see the new product portfolio is in three pillars. The first is the Sales Engine pillar where we have products like ERS 360° and commission management. The transactions from these products generate data, and that data will be consumed by the Analytical pillar, which will provide insights to the operator, with products like Smart S&D, allowing them to see where they have missing stock in real time, and more. Then we have the third pillar, which is the Action pillar, which enables operators to transform the insights coming from the analytical pillar into actions. The objective here is to offer customers a modular approach, where they can easily opt for even one or two of these pillars without any integrability problems. 

The trick is to harness the synergistic potential of the product portfolio, from the transactional platforms like ERS and IDM, and the data-driven modules of Smart S&D. We empower the POS with our portfolio by offering one unified way of managing all interfaces. Capitalizing on the fact that we deployed platforms like ERS that can provide large amounts of transactional data to filter into more meaningful, granular, and actionable insights, we enable MNOs to make data-driven decisions using analytical platforms along with the transactional products.

For me, our evolution to microservices has been a great approach for our new modular product ecosystem, but we have a long way to go before tapping into its full potential. We need to consolidate all our value-adding features that may have been left behind in the technological switch to cloud native technology and microservices architecture. But in the long term, we are already ahead of much of our competition. There are still some key questions we have to answer: Can we scale the new tech platform? Can we get everyone trained in our team to be on board with the technological shift? These are the parameters we have to play with. Even then, the shift to microservices and cloud native is quite aligned with our future goals.

Moving to Microservices architecture has been a defining moment in our history because it helps the entire telecom infrastructure to move towards consolidation. MNOs now need more control over their infrastructure and IT systems, which has made cloud native and microservices crucial. With the concept of data centers moving from a single unit serving a single customer for a specific function to much more broader services and functions, our technological change has enabled the operators to do exactly what they want. Seamless technology is poised to give all the benefits of this new tech shift.

I think our foundation is very strong, and the main thing now is to grow from that. We have managed to improve the services for all our existing customers over the last few years. A combination of ERS 360° and Smart S&D is going to be a very interesting option for the operators in the future. Being a very comprehensive transaction platform means that we are collecting a large amount of data points on the market, on the patterns, and on the behavioral aspects. With Smart S&D capturing those data points and putting them in a perspective which helps the operator to understand how a certain segment is behaving as a whole has a very strong market proposition.

We need to help our customers not only put the base platforms (ERS) or processes in place but also extract the right data and perform analytics on top of this. Where are customers topping up? Where are they using these services? How are our market shares in comparison to the competitors? We can measure these parameters with our analytical wing and products like Smart S&D and MyNext POS. The top item on my to-do list is to figure out how we can build one ecosystem and create more synergies between Seamless products and its analytical arm.

We want to follow our existing and potential customers into new markets and establish a robust footprint there as well, primarily in areas like APAC and Latin America and build more on digital distribution combined with analytics. We will continue to focus on our existing strategy, that is to offer standardized products to deliver value for sales and distribution, but charge our product portfolio with more data-driven synergy.
What we will contribute from the Seamless side to the industry is to continue to support the customers to move into more advanced services like mobile money to help them transition into new and more advanced directions.

We are a niche player in the telecom landscape, with a dominant focus on POS of operators, first with physical and then with digital. The key strategy is to enhance the POS experience for the operator. Indirect sales is a significant part of an operator’s landscape and currently it doesn’t really get the attention it deserves. We understand sales and distribution, POS is the representative of the operator for a subscriber, and so we empower the POS to improve the retail value management of the MNO.