Experience IT was a key partner in the design and development of the Roaming Recharge Broker (RRB) product for Alphyra (now Payzone plc).
RRB enables a roaming prepaid subscriber to recharge while abroad by purchasing and ‘burning’ a topup voucher from a partner network in the visited country. The participant operators were: O2 (Ireland, UK, Germany); Amena (Spain); Wind (Italy); Sunrise (Switzerland); Telenor (Norway); Sonofon (Denmark); One (Austria); Pannon (Hungary).
Alphyra was the prime vendor - to whom the contract was awarded by the Starmap Alliance. The network components (IVR, USSD gateway and IN interfaces) were developed by Redknee corp. The back-office software was joint-developed by Alphyra and sister-company Doolin Technology. The Starmap Alliance members were collectively represented by Ammeon who coordinated much of their responses and provided program management services to the ‘customer side’. Experience IT was contracted to gather requirements and architect the back-office components.
Experience IT was responsible for:-
- negotiating the requirements with the various network operators
- liaising with technical and financial contact personnel in all Operators throughout the duration of the project on behalf of Alphyra
- maintenance of the various requirements and compliance matrixes
- ensuring that cross jurisdictional accounting and taxation issues were complied with
- architecting Solution Designs for the RRB Back Office and RRB Customer Care modules
- designing a method to process transactions (EDRs generated by the network), reconcile and settle inter-operator payments
- running the Quality Assurance program to co-ordinate with the implementation vendors and the customers through to user acceptance test
- designing a comprehensive test suite to enable the EDR processing, multi-currency conversions and settlement components to be fully verified
As each transaction (event) required four currencies (home operator, visitor network currency, EUR for central/consolidated reporting and XDR for inter-operator settlement) the financial systems design was somewhat challenging (to say the least) and the audit trails for each transaction and all currency translations were fun to design. Thankfully, earlier work with various other clients (principally on the € triangulation transitions) enabled us to achieve an elegant and effective solution.
From the perspective of project management and expectation management, this was the most challenging project in which we have engaged. It was enlightening to work with such a diverse range of supposedly similar businesses each with differing legal, commercial and technical challenges to effect a single solution. We got to visit each of the blue countries below at least once and many twice!
