What steps should an operator take to evolve to the two-sided business model? Are any operators actually doing this yet?
As a first step, we would encourage each operator to engage one friendly “upstream” customer (e.g. a retailer, bank, government agency) to trial one B2B VAS and demonstrate that market demand exists and the services are implementable. As one of many examples, Turkcell has deployed many B2B VAS examples, from identity to payments to advertising. Indeed, their impressive “Chief VAS Officer”, Cenk Serdar, is effectively the deputy CEO, which shows the importance they attach to this. Telus has some interesting experiments going on with point of sale terminals and wholesale data. And Verizon’s ODI program has a very “Telco 2.0” feel to it. BT is making some very interesting moves around customer interaction and integration of web and telephony with their purchase of Ribbit.
