Partnership will help mobile service providers improve the prepaid user experience

CHICAGO  - October 19, 2010 -  Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), the leading provider of customer experience systems, and Vesta Corporation, a global pioneer in electronic payment solutions, today announced a partnership agreement to help mobile service providers improve the customer experience for prepaid users. Under the agreement, the two companies now offer a unique solution incorporating Vesta’s proprietary top-up service with Amdocs Prepaid – a software solution for service creation and delivery, real-time charging and customer management. The announcement was made at 4G World taking place this week.

Prepaid usage is increasing globally. Research indicates that prepaid subscriptions claimed 72 percent of all global subscriptions in the second quarter of 2009[1].  Prepaid users pose a growing challenge for service providers as, on the one hand, competition for their business is intensifying while on the other, the lack of a contract means they are more likely to churn.

“Today’s prepaid offerings mostly focus on real-time charging and replenishment capabilities. These offerings should evolve to help service providers gain more control over the satisfaction levels and loyalty of the prepaid consumer,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing at Amdocs. “Our partnership with Vesta is just the first step in expanding Amdocs’ offering to help our customers to deliver a more compelling prepaid experience.”

“A prepaid user can decide to change providers at every top-up,” said Matt Hall, vice president of business development at Vesta. “The joint Amdocs and Vesta solution reduces this risk by assuring a good user experience. It does so by enabling service providers to offer end-users extremely convenient top-up channels, coupled with innovative pricing schemes, such as hybrid prepaid postpaid models.”

The joint offering includes the Amdocs Prepaid solution and Vesta’s Mobile Payment Platform. Amdocs Prepaid provides advanced charging capabilities for the creation of sophisticated offers that bundle services (e.g. voice, data, SMS) and prepaid/postpaid payment channels. Amdocs Prepaid is based on Amdocs’ unique Turbo Charging technology which has set the industry record for real-time charging performance, demonstrating the ability to process 276 million calls during peak calling hours, also known as busy hour call attempts (BHCA).

Vesta’s Mobile Payment Platform enables end-users to top-up quickly, securely, and without registering, through a broad selection of direct payment channels (vs. point of sale), including online, over the phone, or by an automatic procedure (when payment is automatically deducted on a given day, when hitting a low balance, or at the balance expiry). Additionally, using proprietary and patented fraud technology, the Vesta platform allows the service provider to decline fewer top-up requests and reduce the risk associated with non cash payments, whereby maximizing top-up revenue.

Amdocs supports today more than 140 million prepaid end-users worldwide. For more information about the Amdocs prepaid solution, please visit http://www.amdocs.com/Billing-Prepaid
 
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