RAG TV Season 2

RAG TV Season 2: Episode Guide and Recordings

S2E10 – 19 August 2020

Kathy Romano talks about the progression of revenue assurance during her time at Verizon, and how she now reapplies the same concepts to the pay-per-view content supplied by Discovery. Bryan Rowe of Six Degrees gives a deep dive into the factors that lead to refiling fraud and the various methods used to prevent it.

Hosts Eric and Lee also discuss the finding that 22 percent of data breaches covered by the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2020 were caused by human error, and draw an analogy with the underreporting of revenue leakages.

S2E9 – 12 August 2020

David Smith talks about the 2001 publication Successfully Managing Revenue Assurance, written by David in collaboration with Peter Carling and Richard Peachey, and how the revenue assurance principles it defined had emerged from the audit of British phone meters in the 1990’s. David also told us why those principles remain relevant decades later, remembers the development of the first revenue assurance measures and benchmarking, and reveals why his follow-up book about margin management has still not been published, despite requests to make it publicly available.

Hosts Eric and Nixon discuss US plans to curb Chinese surveillance through its ‘Clean Network’ program, and the ethical breakdown that leads some practitioners to claim they are ‘certified’ fraud officers although they gave the certificates to themselves.

S2E8 – 5 August 2020

Dario Betti, CEO of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF), talks about messaging fraud and why his association is updating its A2P SMS Code of Conduct for telcos, aggregators, system providers and enterprises involved in sending A2P SMS messages. MEF’s A2P mobile messaging fraud framework can be found here.

Tony Sani, co-founder of Orillion Solutions, shows us around an exciting new video game that teaches players about the risks faced by telcos, and explains why teaching through play is much more effective than most other forms of staff training. A playable demo of the game can be found here.

Hosts Eric and Lee discuss the ramifications of allowing telcos to use analytics to automatically decide which calls should be blocked, and why low orbit satellites are a threat to the strategies pursued by some telcos.

S2E7 – 29 July 2020

Ingrid Azzopardi, who leads the internal audit function at Maltese operator GO, talks about the impact of COVID-19 and why it is vital to educate both customers and employees about fraud.

George Bolt, a scientist and inventor who is the Head of Analytics at Neural Technologies, discusses revenue assurance and fraud management use cases for pattern detection by machine learning.

Hosts Eric and Lee use coronavirus as a way to illustrate key principles in risk management whilst debating whether it will change the telecoms industry forever.

S2E6 – 22 July 2020

Nikhil Sehgal talks about his new role overseeing engineering governance for the Technology division of multinational network operator Colt. In this role Nikhil seeks to maximize the value from Colt’s spending on network assets, with the intention that he gains a comprehensive understanding of the use and profitability of every component of their network. During the interview Nikhil contrasts his current assurance and risk management goals with those of his previous position as Head of Business Assurance and Insights.

Steffen Öftring, Director of Revenue Assurance at SIGOS, explains why his firm decided to become the new sponsors of RAG Learning, our online training platform. Steffen also comments on the recent acquisition of SIGOS by Mobileum and the strategy to be adopted by the combined business.

Hosts Eric and Lee also talk about cryptocurrency scammers hacking blue-tick accounts at Twitter and the implications of the highest court in the EU overturning the EU-US Privacy Shield data protection deal, the second time this court has invalidated a personal data privacy agreement between the European Commission and the US government in just five years.

S2E5 – 15 July 2020

Francis Afful, Senior RAFM Manager at MTN Ghana, talks about tariff harmonisation across West Africa and how it will lead to the risk of negative margins for telcos. Francis also shares his views on bypass fraud and regulatory audits of telco revenues. Guy Howie of Biaas discusses the reasons why the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has proven unable to track changes to national number plans, and how fraudsters keep finding new ways to exploit loopholes in the way the plans are managed.

Eric and Lee also discuss the impact on Huawei of national security decisions made by the USA and UK, and the acquistion of leading test call firm SIGOS by RAFM market leader Mobileum.

S2E4 – 8 July 2020

Taher Talib of Shaw Communciations, Nithin Gangadharan of Subex and Tony Sani of Orillion discuss why telcos like Shaw are using the fraud management systems (FMS) supplied by vendors like Subex to automatically exchange wangiri intelligence with other telcos via a blockchain developed by Orillion.

Co-hosts Eric and Lee also chat about the relatively small proportion of US voice calls being authenticated using STIR/SHAKEN, and they celebrated RAG TV’s streaming channel exceeding 10,000 views since its launch!

S2E3 – 1 July 2020

Dion Price, CEO of Trustonic, talks about different ways to control the handset to encourage customers to pay their bills by selectively disconnecting some but not all services they can use. Kingsley Unah, formerly Financial Controller and General Manager for RAFM at Airtel Nigeria, contrasts telco billing accuracy and KYC in Nigeria and his new home, Canada.

Hosts Eric and Lee also talk about the dramatic fight to suspend mobile money services in Zimbabwe amidst government claims of money laundering and systematic ‘printing’ of digital money.

S2E2 – 24 June 2020

Daniele Cellai of Hewlett Packard Enterprise talks about case scoring for fraud cases, how this helps businesses to prioritize work and avoid wasting time on false positives, and the various kinds of machine learning that can be used to improve case scoring so decisions on how to respond to frauds can be made automatically.

Regular hosts Eric and Lee also discuss the risk of privacy breaches when participants register for webinars and virtual conferences.

S2E1 – 17 June 2020

Timo Vainionpää, owner of AurorA International Telecom, talks about the downsides to least cost routing and the impact that origin-based pricing is having on fraud. Donald Reinhart of LATRO Services explains the factors that encourage bypass and why he advocates responding with a mix of controls including test calls, analytics and interpretation of network signals.

Regular hosts Eric and Lee also discuss racial bias amongst telecoms risk professionals and the reuse of IMEIs.