RateIntegration, Inc., a leading provider of 3rd-generation Revenue Life Cycle Management (RLM) solutions for the telecom and Internet 2.0 market, has told OSS News Review that its ARS 3.0 Advanced Rating Server product has been selected by Chess Communications AS, Scandinavia’s leading Service Provider.

Chess has signed a new contract with Sergel/RateIntegration, following their successful cooperation since February 2005. RateIntegration’s ARS 3.0 Advanced Rating Server is at the heart of the Sergel service bureau, with many major carrier-customers in the Scandinavian region, generating subscriptions rating calls, SMS and MMS messages as well as WAP sessions.

The Service Bureau provides Rating, Billing, Accounts Receivable, Customer Care and Customer Self Care services that span the entire Chess product portfolio and will cover all the market segments where Chess is active. Within the long-standing RateIntegration-Sergel relationship since 2003, Sergel has implemented RateIntegration’s rating technology in multiple systems, most importantly, as the pricing and rating element of its Billionaire Billing Services - http://www.sergel.com/upload/EN/Produkter/produktblad_services.pdf

Chess’ advanced bundling, pricing, and discount/promotions are handled by Billionaire. One of the most critical factors responsible for the success of Chess has been its unsurpassed time to market for new bundles, price plans and subscriptions. With 92% of the Norwegian mobile market shared by TeliaSonera and its competitor Telenor, penetration of this market was already extremely high, and there was little scope for more growth without significant service innovation or the allocation of a large budget to acquiring and retaining customers. With its flexible rules based engine and configuration-driven architecture. RateIntegration’s ARS 3.0 Advanced Rating Server delivered on the former enabling Chess its competitive edge.

Comments Mr. Arve Andreassen, CTO, Chess Communication AS, “Apart from its excellent performance and accuracy, RateIntegration facilitates our most critical success factor - our ability to be the fastest player in the Norwegian market. The key to our success is to be innovative and offer the highly sophisticated Scandinavian mobile customers, attractive new offers, bundles, promotions and discounts as fast as our marketing experts conceive of these. Whether these are community offers or complex prepaid-postpaid hybrid subscriptions, we can get these out fast. It is all about loyalty, and the key to creating loyal customers is to be faster and more innovative than our competitors in responding to new demands. I am delighted to summarize that the Advanced Rating Server has met all our expectations in facilitating this.”

Imran Jan, EVP of business development at RateIntegration considers this win to be “…proof that the RateIntegration product set is poised to replace a significant share of obsolete and rigid rating engines that exist inside current billing systems. A small investment in an advanced rating product like our ARS 3.0, followed by a deployment of our 3rd-generation loyalty management product, RLM 3.0, could transform a service provider or carrier with legacy BSS investments from playing catch-up to becoming an industry-leader.”

About RateIntegration, Inc.
RateIntegration offers the industry’s only 3rd generation Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) solutions that enable Telecom, Media, Entertainment and Internet 2.0 services providers world-wide to maximize market share, revenues and profit margins for every service offering, customer agreement and transaction. The Company’s primary solutions are based on its flagship pricing engine that has been processing annual revenues of over $15 billion at global Tier I service providers for over eight years and include a new Loyalty Manager product as well. Each of these solutions can be implemented without replacing the existing BSS system, without creating multiple copies of existing data and without on-going IT programming costs and delays. http://www.rateintegration.com

About Sergel
Sergel is one of Scandinavia’s leading companies in the billing service bureau/out sourcing market. Sergel offers its customers the option to outsource a part of, or the entire payment process. Its Customer Care and Billing service, Billionaire, offers a flexible solution, supporting future communication services and business models. It is designed to give customers a competitive edge in their market by enabling them to capture the business benefits of increased revenues, reduced costs and satisfied customers. With over 200 employees and headquarter in Stockholm, it has several local offices in Helsinki, Karlstad, Gothenburg, Vilnius, Visby, Oslo and Skellefteå.

About Chess
Chess a subsidiary of TeliaSonera, the second largest supplier of mobile services in Norway, offers a complete range of mobile services for businesses and consumers. Most characteristic for the Norwegian mobile market is the extensive usage of non-voice services, and Chess’ customers are among the top users of MMS and SMS in Europe. The company has a significant share of the Norwegian mobile market.