For a long time I found that the phrase “revenue assurance” was used in two contexts only:
- Telcos trying to find and plug leaks, something I know about; and
- Subsidies given to farmers in the U.S.A., something I know nothing about.
These days the phrase crops up in more and more places. There must be someone out there diligently popularizing the phrase. Utilities do it, governments do it, now it sounds like airlines also do revenue assurance. Read here the press release from Kale Consultants, the travel IT solutions business, about buying what they call the “largest provider of airline revenue assurance”, Zero Octa.
Well, it is wonderful that people are using the phrase, even if they all seem to mean something slightly different when they do ;) However, the question I have been asking for years is who first coined the term “revenue assurance”? Try as I might, I can never get a definitive answer. Which is a shame, because whoever first used the phrase really deserves to be called a thought leader, unlike most of the self-appointed thought leaders we hear about these days. The best I have done so far is to establish that the phrase was being used in BT back in the early 1990’s. That puts them way ahead of the average telco, but hardly proves they were first. Everybody is doing revenue assurance these days, but who named it “revenue assurance” first?
