International activities

Telesign

Telesign provides digital identity services, international delivery authentication, and programmable communications for the world’s largest internet brands, digital champions, and cloudnative businesses.

Building trust in the digital experience

The prevalence and growth of communication fraud (including IRSF), account takeover fraud, and charge-back fraud have risen to alarming levels. They are costing companies billions of euros each year. With over 2,200 behavioral variables, phone number intelligence, traffic pattern analysis, and an extensive global fraud database, Telesign assesses the risk of bad actors and pre-empts fraudulent activities.

From onboarding and engagement to account integrity and fraud protection, Telesign builds trust across the full journey of digital experience for companies and their consumers. By signing new users globally with safe, simple, and secure approaches to onboarding, Telesign has helped reduce the presence of fake and unreliable users.

Telesign’s growth strategy is built on four pillars

Use-case and value-chain expansion; new customer segments; geographic expansion; and continued market growth.

• Use-case and value-chain expansion – Telesign evaluates whether new use cases would benefit from its digital identity and programmable communication capabilities. Its current focus is on transaction-fraud management and risk-based authentication, while also seeing opportunities in areas such as single sign-on, document verification, and digital-channel measurement services. Additionally, there are substantial product-cross-selling opportunities across Telesign’s customer base.
• New customer segments – Telesign also sees profitable growth emanating from new customer segments. Today, its customers are mostly larger organizations with higher levels of sophistication. But a tremendous, margin-accretive opportunity is opening up in extending Telesign’s customer focus to mid-market companies and SMEs. Telesign is increasing digital marketing and internal sales resources to focus on these segments and integrating low-code/no-code graphical design tools popular with SMEs.
• Geographic expansion – Telesign has opportunities to significantly add to its growth by expanding geographically. In 2021, only 27% of its revenue came from customers based outside the US. Telesign can grow international revenue with its existing large-cap customer base, while also adding new non-U.S. customers. To accomplish this, Telesign is onboarding additional sales and marketing resources outside North America, including demand generation, account and customer success managers, and account-based marketing. M&A will also be considered to establish Telesign’s presence in regions of strategic interest.
• Market growth – As the world continues to transform offline consumer activities into digital experiences, as mobile becomes the primary source of identity, and as machine learning and analytics become critical in addressing fraud, Telesign’s global addressable market is also growing rapidly. Telesign is well positioned to take advantage of this growing market.

In 2023, Telesign has developed numerous product innovations:

• The “self-service” feature allows businesses of any size to connect, protect, and defend their customer relationships using the same services that Telesign already provides to the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world.
• The launch of Breached Data enables businesses to determine at critical moments if and when a phone number and any associated data attributes have been subject to a data breach. The Telesign solution helps to detect vulnerabilities in account password resets, unauthorized purchases, account takeover attacks, and synthetic identity creation. 
• The introduction of email into the Messaging API: The channel expansion supports programmatic email delivery and offers businesses the flexibility to seamlessly communicate across six channels – SMS, MMS, RCS, WhatsApp, Viber & email – using a single API. 
• The incorporation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) into the Voice API: With ASR, businesses users can deploy interactive voice response systems to enhance customer convenience, accessibility and operations.

In March 2024, Telesign unveiled Verify API, an Integrated Omnichannel Verification Solution in the Global Battle Against Cyber Fraud.

In response to the escalating threat of cyber fraud and rising SMS costs, Telesign, the leading provider of customer identity and engagement solutions, announced the launch of Verify API. This new omnichannel API integrates seven leading user verification channels: SMS, Silent Verification, Push, Email, WhatsApp, Viber, and RCS (Rich Communication Services) into a unified API. With a single integration, Telesign’s Verify API enables businesses to effortlessly scale new authentication channels with minimal development resources.

This future-proofed technology marks a significant milestone in the fight against fraudulent activities. With built-in defense against SMS vulnerabilities, such as social engineering, phishing, and SIM-based attacks, the Verify API offers a better, more secure end-user verification experience.

Telesign is fully owned by Proximus Opal, a subsidiary of the Proximus Group.

More info: www.telesign.com

BICS

BICS connects people, applications and things across borders, enabling global communications for mobile operators and enterprises all around the world.

Communications platform

BICS’ strategy is anchored in its bedrock of leadership in the traditional telecoms market. BICS is leveraging its expertise and global footprint to build digital services and benefit widely adopted use cases of digital transformation on a worldwide scale.

BICS has strengthened its leadership position through strategic partnerships across both the telecom and enterprise markets.

Partnerships

BICS partners with leading global players. For instance, it renewed its Bayobab (previously MTN GlobalConnect) partnership, a pan-African digital wholesale and infrastructure services company, through which it collaborates on international mobility and connectivity for Africa. BICS also partnered with the network software provider Mavenir to launch a new Voice Over LTE (4G) solution that helps operators prepare for the phase-out of 2G and 3G services around the world. BICS also partners with Microsoft: together they help enterprises avoid network ‘lock-ins’ and enable devices to roam through private and public mobile networks around the world without the need for complex operator agreements.

Furthermore, BICS has strengthened its network with a new SDN (software-defined networking) controller developed by Nokia. The new intelligence module automates optimal traffic routing on the network, improving overall performance for consumers while laying the groundwork for use cases such as 5G network slicing and bandwidth calendaring.

Innovation

A range of innovations are being developed at BICS, including its 5G Standalone Roaming Hub, which announced its first full-service 5G Standalone connection in October 2023. BICS’ hub makes it easy for operators to allow data, texts and calls to be carried across a 5G mobile network. Moreover, they benefit from additional fraud and intelligence security, on top of the Secure Edge Protection Proxy (SEPP) standard requirements for 5G Standalone. Established on BICS’ next generation data roaming network (IPX), the hub opens the door for operators to easily access the business opportunities and innovation offered by 5G Standalone.

Trusted Communications

BICS’ anti-fraud solutions blocked over 87 million Euros’ worth of fraud attacks in 2023, and BICS is a key player in building and advocating for the global fight against telecom fraud.

BICS actively participates in international industry bodies focused on fraud prevention, such as the i3Forum, GSMA, MEF, etc., promoting pan-industry collaboration in the fight against fraud. GLF named BICS as fully compliant with its anti-fraud Code of Conduct, and in 2023, based on its expertise in telecoms fraud awareness and protection, BICS was elected as a board member of the i3Forum, an organization driving global collaboration and innovation between international service providers, voice carriers and technology partners.

More info: www.bics.com

Route Mobile

Route Mobile Limited is a leading global provider of cloud communication services, specializing in Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) solutions.

Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Mumbai, India, the company has a strong international presence, offering a comprehensive suite of products and services that include SMS, OTT messaging, chatbot, voice, email, SMS filtering, analytics, and monetization.

Catering to enterprises, over-the-top (OTT) players, and mobile network operators (MNO), Route Mobile is known for its innovative solutions that drive customer engagement and business growth. With strategic acquisitions and a commitment to technological advancement, the company continues to expand its offerings and global footprint, making significant strides in the communication technology sector. It is present in 20+ countries and caters to over 3000 enterprise customers.

Route Mobile is a part of leading industry bodies like the GSMA, MEF, IAMAI and CII. It has been recognized as the tier 1 provider in A2P SMS as well as CPaaS market impact report by Rocco, an established leader in the Juniper CPaaS competitor dashboard 2022-2027 and a major provider in the Gartner CPaaS Magic Quadrant 2023.

Proximus Opal owns 82.70% of the shares of Route Mobile and will ensure that it reduces its stake to 75% by May 2025 in order to respect the maximum aggregate shareholding level required by Indian regulations.

More info: www.routemobile.com