Quick Summary
Sheerbit’s customizable MVNO billing solutions overcome one-size-fits-all restrictions, allowing you to have a system that meets your specific business requirements. Our modular architecture enables you to use mediation, rating, invoicing or settlement as stand-alone components and connect them with your CRM and provisioning systems using APIs. A configurable rating engine can offer tiered discounts, time of day rules and partner-specific tariffs so offers can be launched in hours instead of weeks. Real-time analytic dashboards, exception automated workflows give you full transparency of usage trends, revenue performance and dispute resolution.
Cloud-native scalability ensures you can bill without error, whether you have ten thousand or ten million subscribers. As a leading MVNO billing solutions provider, Sheerbit will also ensure regulatory compliance, security and continuous enhancements to features. If you are ready to drive better revenue operations and grow faster with a proven MVNO billing provider, contact Sheerbit today.
Index
- Introduction
- Market Trends and Growth Drivers
- Main Challenges with Traditional MVNO Billing
- Why Custom MVNO Billing Development is Important
- Architecture and Approach to MVNO billing
- Regulatory Compliance and Security
- Integration with Emerging Technologies
- Case Studies and Success Metrics
- Roadmap and Continuous Improvement
- Benefits Summary
- Engaging with Sheerbit
- Conclusion
1. Introduction
Billing is at the heart of every mobile virtual network operator operation. A successful billing system will be able to process millions of usage records every day, produce accurate invoicing, manage complex partner settlements and provide real-time visibility to funds and operations. However, most MVNO billing engines have limited adaptability to unique service bundles, changing tariff structures and quickening pace to market due to continued customer demand. As a result, operators can suffer from revenue leakage, billing disputes, long time-to-market for new offers and dissatisfied customers.
Sheerbit solves these problems by building custom MVNO billing platforms that align exactly to your business model, support rapid, seamless integrations and can scale with ease from 1000 subscribers to over 5 million subscribers.
2. Market Trends and Growth Drivers
The global MVNO market is expected to exceed USD 137.41 billion by 2033 driven by increased consumer expectations for personalized plans and niche MVNOs. While specialty MVNOs targeting specific verticals such as IoT, healthcare or enterprise continue to emerge, new digital-first brands are also developing seamless online experiences. Meanwhile, changes in regulation around number portability, a new regime for wholesale access and data privacy mean billing systems need to be able to demonstrate robust audit trails and respond rapidly to new compliance frameworks.
In fast-evolving markets, MVNO billing solutions that are inflexible or require excessive customization, risk leaving operators unable to take advantage of
3. Main Challenges with Traditional MVNO Billing
3.1 Complexity of Service Bundles
Operators are increasingly providing bundled packages consisting of voice data messaging value-added services and some third-party content subscriptions. Billing and rating these bundles requires detailed tracking of their usage by user group promotion period and through management channels. When it comes to overages, usage resets proportion and carryover balances, all of these must be properly managed throughout the process to avoid lost revenue and dissatisfied customers.
3.2 Multiple Partners and Settlement Arrangements
Whether you partner with primary network operators for roaming, content providers for streaming services, or reseller channels for retailer distribution, every relationship has a unique tariff structure, rating rules, and settlement agreement. The reconciliation of usage records against a complex and dynamic partner price list often results in complicated spreadsheets, manual entries, and delayed payments. Without automated mediation and reconciliation workflows, finance teams spend more time finding resolution to disputes instead of working towards strategic growth.
3.3 Legacy Systems and Integration Gaps
Many operators still utilize legacy billing engines not intended for an mvno model. These monolithic engines make it difficult to accommodate new rating definitions, enforce dynamic policy rules, or integrate through modern APIs with customer care, provisioning, and analytics platforms. Upgrades can take months of negotiating with a vendor and a costly consulting taxing engagement to even consider. The outcome leads to slow time to market for new plans developed, and no ability to innovate at scale.
3.4 Lack of Visibility
In conventional environments billing is done offline meaning the data has to be exported manually cleaned up and consolidated from mediation engines rating tables and billing repositories. This delay in synchronising the data, if ever, means that product teams are not empowered to act on real-time information dynamically optimising their offers and price points that could risk exposing operators to compliance loopholes due to incomplete audit trails.
4. Why Custom MVNO Billing Development is Important
Generic solutions will only address a small portion of your real needs. A platform that is designed by Sheerbit from the ground up gives you
- Fit to your business model
- Automated fully from mediation to settlement
- Scale to quickly grow subscribers
- Ability to quickly market new services measured in days not months
- Transparency with genuine audit trails and live metrics
5. Architecture and Approach to MVNO billing
5.1 Discovery and Requirements Engineering
Our engagement first phase consists of a series of collaborative workshops with key stakeholders from product finance IT operations and partner management to identify all revenue and cost flows for the duration of the subscribers’ life from on boarding, to usage, mediation, rating invoicing, settlement and finally revenue recognition. This blueprint means that nothing is left to chance – no edge cases are missed.
5.2 Modular Microservices Architecture
Sheerbit’s billing engine is built on microservices, each module covers:
- Mediation and record enhancement
- Rating and charging records
- Invoicing and record distribution
- Partner settlement and discretionary competitive status
Each service exposes RESTful API services that can be easily integrated into your existing customer care, CRM and order management and provisioning tools. You only use modules that you need but all data about subscribers works on one data model.
5.3 Flexible rating engine
At the core of every mvno billing solution is the rating engine. Sheerbit’s engine enables:
- Tier-based and volume-based discounts
- Rules and tables for time-of-day and geography-based ratings
- Free legs for promotions and carry-over balances for users
- Tariffs specific to partners with dynamic tables
All rates are defined within configuration files or databases, enabling business users to launch new promotional offers in hours, not weeks.
5.4 Automated Mediation and Exception Handling
Mediation pipelines take in raw call detail records, SMS records, and data sessions from your network element feeds where we enrich the data (for example, add subscriber group tags and promotional flags), perform validation to ensure integrity based on business rules, and then validate exceptions and errors that are routed to exception workflows with root-cause dashboards for expedient resolution.
5.5 Invoice Creation, Distribution and Self-Care
Invoices can be delivered as PDF, CSV, or XML formats via email, SFTP or fully integrated into your billing portal. Subscribers and corporate customers view their real-time usage and invoice history, delivered via your white labelling options and self-care portal. You reduce billing inquiries and enable customer confidence with transparency.
5.6 Partner Settlements and Revenue Assurance
For each roaming, content or reseller partner, Sheerbit’s platform will automatically aggregate usage, apply partner tariffs and compute amounts owing with settlement reports where variances are shown, and updates from users are resolved interactively to reconcile variances. Revenue assurance rules also protect against any substantial anomalies with features such as duplicate records, or mismatched ratings to protect your revenue.
5.7 Real-Time Analytics and Dashboards.
Our native analytics suite features live dashboards for:
- Usage Trends by Product Segment and Geo
- Revenue and Margin Performance
- Billing Exception and Dispute Status
- Partner Settlement KPIs
Ad hoc reporting capabilities let finance and product teams drill-down
6. Regulatory Compliance and Security
Alongside functional capabilities, our platform has the regulatory and security requirements that are vital for MVNO:
- GDPR and Local Data Privacy Regulations
- PCI DSS Compliant Payment Processing
- Audit Trails with Immutable Ledger of Rating and Invoicing Actions
- Role Based Access Control and Single Sign-On Integrations
- Encryption in Rest and in Transit
7. Integration with Emerging Technologies
Sheerbit continues to innovate and help you use:
- Blockchain-Based Settlement for Immutable Partner Reconciliation
- Anomaly Detection with Artificial Intelligence for Revenue Leak Prevention
- Real-Time Event Streaming with Apache Kafka for Instant Notifications
- Event-Driven, Container-based Edge Deployments for IoT-based MVNOs
8. Case Studies and Success Metrics
8.1 Regional MVNO Turnaround
A regional operator with 200,000 prepaid subscribers had over 2% of revenue being disputed every month and settlement taking longer than 60 days. After the operator implemented Sheerbit‘s custom mvno billing solution, dissatisfaction dropped to less than 0.4% and most partners were settled in 15 days. Cash flow improved by 25% in six months.
8.2 Enterprise IoT MVNO Launch
An enterprise mvno targeting connected devices required sub-second rating and real-time balance updates for tens of millions of M2M endpoints to consume bank data. Sheerbit designed a light-weight mediation pipeline and in-line rating engine with the ability to process 10,000 events per second with end-to-end latency of less than 200 milliseconds.
9. Roadmap and Continuous Improvement
Sheerbit follows an agile delivery model consisting of 2-week sprints, and quarterly roadmap reviews. As your business changes we continuously deliver new features such as new rating scenarios, settlement formats, analytics widgets and self-care portal capabilities without any disruption, and without a system upgrade.
10. Benefits Summary
- Shorter Time to Market for New Services
- Reduced Operating Costs through Automation
- Improved Revenue Assurance and Profit Margins
- Increased Customer Satisfaction through Transparent Billing
- Future Proof Platform that Scales with Subscriber Growth
11. Engaging with Sheerbit
- Schedule your free discovery session today
- Receive a custom proposal with elements, cost, and timing
- Start implementation with phased pilot and rapid ROI
- Roll out across all products and markets as your business grows
12. Conclusion
In today’s competitive mvno, the ability to innovate quickly, keep perfect control of revenue, and deliver a seamless outstanding customer experience has never been more critical. Sheerbit’s experience as a mvno billing solutions provider, ensures that your billing platform will be properly aligned with your business requirements now and be adaptable for years to come.
Ready to change how your billing operates and rapidly ramp-up? Talk to Sheerbit now about how our custom mvno billing solutions will drive your success.
