Overview
Latin America’s telecom market is defined by intense price competition, a predominantly prepaid subscriber base, and growing digital adoption across diverse geographies. For operators, Value-Added Services (VAS) remain a critical lever to sustain revenues and differentiate in markets where ARPU is under constant pressure.
A leading telecom group in the region, with 50M+ subscribers across multiple countries, faced a growing challenge: its VAS portfolio was fragmented across operating companies (OpCos), running on disparate platforms and managed by multiple vendors. The result was inconsistent service experiences, high operating costs, and limited agility in responding to rising digital demand.
To address these challenges, the group partnered with Wavenet to consolidate its VAS infrastructure into a single, scalable platform capable of supporting both today’s subscriber expectations and tomorrow’s 5G-driven digital services.
The Challenge
Despite scale and regional footprint, the group’s VAS ecosystem struggled to keep pace with market demands:
- Fragmented systems across OpCos led to siloed operations and duplication of vendors.
- Inconsistent customer experiences — subscribers faced different USSD menus, short codes, and service journeys in each market.
- Strained legacy infrastructure unable to manage the surge in micro-transactions driven by prepaid top-ups, bundles, OTT packs, and mobile money.
- High total cost of ownership due to redundant infrastructure and fragmented management.
- Slow time-to-market for launching new services in highly competitive markets.
With prepaid subscriber journeys central to revenue generation in LatAm, these inefficiencies risked revenue leakage, poor customer satisfaction, and slower digital adoption.
The Solution
As the exclusive VAS vendor, Wavenet implemented a multi-OpCo VAS consolidation framework designed specifically for large-scale, prepaid-driven markets like Latin America.
Key solution highlights:
- Consolidated Deployments: Unified VAS operations across 8 operating companies, creating regional consistency.
- Centralized Onboarding & Orchestration: Integration of 3,500+ applications, accelerating partner launches and enabling faster service innovation.
- High-Volume Transaction Scalability: Capacity to process 6,000+ transactions per second, ensuring uninterrupted prepaid balance checks, recharges, and service activations during peak campaigns.
- Extensive Reach: Deployment of 1,000+ short codes across USSD and IP messaging, ensuring service ubiquity in prepaid-heavy markets.
- Future-Ready Architecture: Built-in resilience (N+1 redundancy, auto-failover) and readiness to support 5G-enabled services, mobile money, and digital bundles.
The Outcome
The consolidation delivered measurable transformation across the operator group:
- Seamless subscriber experience: Harmonized VAS journeys across 8 LatAm markets.
- Scale with confidence: 50M+ subscribers supported through one robust regional platform.
- Lower costs, higher efficiency: Simplified vendor management, reduced infrastructure overhead.
- Faster service launches: Regional orchestration enabled quicker rollout of promotions, bundles, and digital packs — reducing churn risk by keeping subscribers engaged with fresh offerings.
- Resilient foundation: Positioned to monetize new digital services, OTT partnerships, and 5G evolution.
Business Value Telecom Operators
By unifying its VAS operations, the telecom group can achieve;
- Competitive advantage in prepaid-heavy markets - consistent journeys drive loyalty and reduce churn.
- monetization opportunities through scalable delivery of microservices (top-ups, OTT bundles, mobile money, insurance, entertainment packs).
- Operational resilience in one of the most competitive and price-sensitive telecom regions globally.
- Freedom from vendor lock-in by standardizing OpCos with one scalable, future-ready platform.
- Future growth readiness with a digital foundation aligned to 5G, IoT, and mobile financial services.
