As legacy companies across industries confront rising customer expectations, tightening compliance demands, and increasingly complex pricing models, outdated billing systems are emerging as a major obstacle to growth. Much like telecom providers a decade ago, these organizations are discovering that siloed, inflexible billing and customer management platforms can’t keep up with today’s pace of change.
Telecom’s journey. Painful but instructive, it offers valuable lessons. From replacing decades-old on-premise systems to adopting cloud-based and Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions, telecoms have navigated the same technical and organizational hurdles that utilities face today. Drawing on that history can help energy providers modernize faster, with fewer missteps.
The ongoing transformation within the telecommunications sector offers valuable insights for the utility industry. For instance:
- At Verizon, the consolidation of five legacy billing systems into a unified platform underscored the critical importance of meticulous documentation and validation during large-scale migrations.
- At Reliance Infocomm, the expansion of the Single View billing platform to support 43 million subscribers highlighted the necessity for a robust and scalable infrastructure.
- At TeliaSonera-Finland, optimizing the Geneva billing systems emphasized the importance of performance tuning and ensuring cross-system compatibility.
These projects collectively illustrate that, despite the complexity of the telecommunications sector, the insights gained can enable utilities to modernize more efficiently and with fewer errors.
SaaS vs On-Premise: Strategic Trade-offs for Billing
One of the most consequential early decisions for any billing transformation is choosing between SaaS and on-premise deployment models. Utilities must weigh flexibility, control, and cost, each with distinct implications for operational resilience and innovation capacity.
SaaS models offer faster deployment, lower upfront costs, and seamless upgrades, making them attractive for organizations seeking agility and scalability. They also shift maintenance responsibilities to the vendor, reducing IT overhead. However, some utilities, particularly those in tightly regulated environments, may hesitate to cede control over data residency, customization, and integration with older systems.
On-premise solutions offer more control and customization, but they come with higher capital costs and slower deployment cycles. They also place the burden of system upkeep, compliance, and patching squarely on internal IT teams.
In evaluating SaaS versus on-premises solutions, our decision was shaped by five critical factors: speed-to-market, cost predictability, compliance readiness, scalability, and internal IT bandwidth. On-premises solutions offered greater control and customization, but they also required significant capital investment, longer deployment timelines, and dedicated resources for maintenance, patching, and compliance.
SaaS, on the other hand, provides faster deployment cycles, a subscription-based cost model, and built-in compliance and security frameworks. It also enabled us to scale more flexibly in response to business needs and reduce the burden on our internal IT teams. Ultimately, the ability to accelerate delivery, manage costs more predictably, and focus internal resources on innovation rather than infrastructure tipped the balance in favor of SaaS.
For many organizations, hybrid models where customer-facing components are SaaS-based, while sensitive back-end processes remain on premises, are emerging as a pragmatic compromise.
Why Modern B/OSS Architecture Matters
Legacy billing systems were not designed to handle the complexities of today’s offerings:
- Time-of-use pricing
- Dynamic demand-response programs
- Green energy credits and renewable buyback options
- Bundled services (e.g., EV charging, solar installation, or home battery storage)
Modern B/OSS (Business/Operations Support Systems) architecture is designed to be modular, API-driven, and cloud-native, allowing utilities to flexibly support evolving rate structures, new energy products, and customer self-service expectations.
In telecom, this architectural shift enabled operators to support both prepaid and postpaid plans simultaneously, introduce real-time usage alerts, and seamlessly bundle mobile, broadband, and OTT services all from a single billing engine. Utilities must now undergo a similar evolution.
Cutting Costs While Improving Accuracy and Transparency
A key benefit of cloud-based or COTS billing systems is operational efficiency. By retiring custom-coded billing stacks and moving to standardized platforms with built-in compliance features, utilities can dramatically lower maintenance costs and reduce reliance on scarce legacy IT skill sets.
More importantly, they can also reduce billing errors and increase transparency for customers. Features like real-time usage visualization, billing breakdowns, and rate plan comparisons help customers understand their bills and reduce call center volume. Automation in exception handling, meter data validation, and reconciliation also ensures greater billing accuracy.
One telecom provider that migrated to a COTS billing platform saw a 20–30% drop in customer complaints related to billing inaccuracies within the first year, according to a benchmark cited in a Gartner utility customer experience report.
Across multiple telecommunications transformation programs, the transition from custom-coded billing stacks to standardized Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) platforms has consistently delivered measurable operational gains. For instance, a comprehensive OSS/BSS implementation at a North American telecom provider utilizing the Kenan FX platform resulted in a 30% improvement in billing cycle efficiency, achieved through streamlined workflows and integrated system design.
Similarly, a Geneva billing system optimization project in Finland achieved a 15% improvement in billing performance and a 70% success rate in integrating with customer care and financial systems, resulting in a significant reduction in billing errors and reconciliation delays.
Another large-scale initiative involved consolidating five legacy billing systems into a unified platform, resulting in a 20% reduction in operational overhead and improved data consistency. These outcomes highlight the benefits of standardized platforms, which not only reduce maintenance costs and dependence on legacy skill sets but also improve billing accuracy, transparency, and customer satisfaction.
Implementation Tips: What the Telecom Industry Got Right (and Wrong)
Modernizing billing platforms is rarely just a tech project—it’s an enterprise-wide transformation. Here are a few hard-won lessons from telecom that utilities would be wise to heed:
- Don’t customize too early: Over-customization is one of the biggest reasons billing projects spiral. Start with out-of-the-box capabilities and only build where absolutely necessary.
- Invest in data hygiene up front: Migrating dirty or inconsistent data into a modern platform undermines the benefits of transformation. Telecoms often spent more time cleaning data than configuring systems.
- Prioritize customer experience: Don’t just replicate old processes in a shiny new platform. Design around the end-user—both internal and external—to ensure adoption and satisfaction.
- Think modular and composable: Choose vendors and systems that allow you to adapt over time. Billing needs will continue to evolve with regulations, renewables, and customer behaviors.
As utilities face mounting pressure to modernize, the telecom industry offers a rich blueprint, filled with both cautionary tales and success stories. Cloud-based and COTS billing solutions have the potential to dramatically improve agility, lower operating costs, and better serve modern customers, but only if implemented with a clear strategy and cross-functional alignment.
Modernizing billing systems has never been more critical. As customer expectations evolve and regulatory requirements intensify, companies can no longer tolerate the inefficiencies and risks associated with legacy platforms. The telecommunications industry’s experience demonstrates that success relies not solely on technological advancements but also on having a well-defined strategy, strong executive sponsorship, and cross-functional alignment. The key insight is that modernization goes beyond a technical upgrade; it is a business necessity that directly influences customer trust, operational resilience, and long-term competitiveness.
By taking a deliberate, lessons-informed approach, companies can turn billing from a cost center into a platform for innovation and customer engagement.
