Safaricom is the market-leading operator in Kenya, and one of the most widely recognised operator brands in Africa. This status was not easily won – the operator has consistently led with innovation, while keeping the experience of its customers at the core of its offering.
To achieve this, Safaricom has fostered strong relationships with selected partners as it implements solutions to facilitate its digital transformation journey.
Key among these is Huawei’s Convergent Billing Solution. Safaricom recently upgraded to the latest version, which is fully cloud-native and features embedded AI to provide an agile base for future services, allowing Safaricom to continuously improve system performance, reliability, stability, and intelligence. This will allow the operator to support customer service growth for its 50 million subscribers, as well as enabling innovative options for monetization.
Safaricom first implemented Huawei’s Convergent Billing Solution in 2011, and it has carried out several upgrades to this system ever since.
The latest version
In 2024, Safaricom implemented Huawei’s latest release, the upgraded system will boost performance, increasing billing capacity by 40%, now able to support up to 70 million users, and reducing bill run duration by 65% – a significant increase to the billing efficiency. Additionally, Huawei’s Convergent Billing Solution recovers more quickly from disruptions to minimize the impact on customers – for example, upgrade patches can be rolled out with zero downtime, and RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) have been reduced from around 5-15 minutes to just 30 seconds. CBS R23 is more open than previous iterations, supporting 200 restful interfaces, which means developers can create new applications for the system more easily. In addition to its new 2B features, the system features a swathe of enhancements around enterprise billing.
Driving platform reliability with AI / smart technology
Safaricom is already using CBS’ AIOPS capabilities such as Fault Correlation Analysis and Visualized Topology to drive innovation, and is also exploring a joint innovation project with Huawei based on the vendor’s Idea to Cash platform, aimed at accelerating monetisation via AI technology. The AI Platform is based on Huawei’s Telecom Foundation Model which can support service innovation from accelerating new service go to market and precise smart recommendation, resulting in faster time to revenue.
As the first step of the Idea to Cash platform, this AI-based Smart Offering Recommendation initiative has already seen some success in Kenya, with Huawei carrying out one pilot project with Safaricom focused on users who tend only to use free data, and therefore do not generate additional revenue for carriers in the past. The innovation identifies Trigger Conditions – e.g. the user reaching the daily limit on their free data allowance – then recommends a smart offer via a flash USSD notification. The recommendation is based on the size, price and validity of the required data allowance, and the user can buy the package directly from the USSD notification, making it better suited to this task than an SMS notification. By using this AI model to recommend the best package at the most appropriate time, Safaricom has seen a 12% conversion rate significant from 3% over traditional mechanism, yielding a 24% increase in ARPU.
“This success of this project has set a great example for future projects. We are very happy to have cooperated with Safaricom in Convergent Billing Solution for over 13 years. In the future, we look forward to working closely with Safaricom to provide better services and experience for end users in the intelligent era.” said Wei Zhuang, Vice President of Software Business Dept, Huawei.
Safaricom CEO Dr Peter Ndegwa said that the upgrade demonstrated the operator’s commitment to its goal of delivering an “always-on” experience to its customer base and noted that the extensive array of APIs would enable a more seamless and integrated customer experience across Safaricom’s services.
