Mobile network technology company, the TruTeq Group, recently established an international division and has opened its international heaquarters in Brisbane, Australia.
Tjaart van der Walt, TruTeq Group CEO and International MD comments: “Since inception in 2001, TruTeq Wireless – now the TruTeq Group – has achieved steady growth and established itself as one of the leading players in the Telco VAS space on the African continent.
“With 25 customers spread across 15 countries, and many of Africa’s leading MNOs on the customer list, this has been an achievement we are incredibly proud of.”
Today, TruTeq solutions serve over 100-million subscribers in Africa and process almost a quarter of a billion transactions per day. In some countries the company’s servers carry significant portions of the countries’ gross national product (GDP).
“Of greater significance than the number of customers TruTeq Group serves, or the revenues it generates is the pride we take in our customers’ level of satisfaction with the products and services we deliver to them. Customer satisfaction is our key metric for success.”
This encompasses building the right products at the right time, understanding customer needs, and being responsive to customer requests for new features and customisation, Van der Walt says.
“Our business ethos has resulted in us expanding our client base, including in Africa – which has formed the bedrock of our international expansion into other markets. While business with Africa continues to grow, our first major global success has been with Westpac in the Pacific region.”
In a multi-country deal with Westpac Pacific, the company rolled out a mobile banking platform with its own telco grade network to serve their entire mobile banking base in the Pacific. This was also TruTeq’s first large scale deployment of the ValiPort fraud prevention system, used to secure mobile banking transactions.
Value Added Services (VAS) remain an essential part of TruTeq’s business. Here the company is seeing substantial growth through a global partnership with Tecnotree for consolidated VAS solutions.
Operators need innovative and cost effective value added services as the basis for differentiation and to build new revenue streams, Van der Walt says. “If an MNO offers lacklustre Value Added Services, its subscribers will have no loyalty, and are likely to shift to a different service provider. Competition is fierce in the MNO marketplace.
“We see VAS consolidation not just as a way of saving our customers money, but also as an opportunity for them to offer better integrated services a lot more rapidly than their competitors,” he adds.
“Our first major success with Tecnotree has come out of Europe where a leading operator has chosen our combined solution to deliver advanced services to their customer base. With our new support centre established in Brisbane we are now able to offer around-the-clock support to our growing international base”
On the innovation front, TruTeq has created a new approach to solving a major MNO challenge – the routing of IP signalling traffic along with legacy traffic. After the successful first deployment of TruTeq’s Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) with a major South African operator, the company is planning to deploy its transaction routing technology globally, where off-the-shelf solutions simply won’t solve their problems.
“Our product not only normalises and routes diameter traffic, but it also integrates older legacy network elements into a streamlined, multi-MVNO environment,” Van der Walt says.
“The extreme performance capability of our routing engine resulted in another benefit – processing big data in real-time. There are a number of benefits flowing from this, such as enriched VAS offerings, dynamic SIM provisioning, new revenue through ValiPort bank fraud detection, realtime network optimisation, traffic profiling, dynamic tariffs and many more. We are sweating and monetising their existing assets,” Van der Walt explains.