Anyone who has been reading my blogs long enough will know I occasionally dig up and share examples of how the phrase “revenue assurance”, and its concepts, are applied to quite different businesses. In the past I found relevant examples relating to airlines, the oil industry, software, and even government taxation. It has been hard to find good new examples worth sharing recently, not least because the phrase revenue assurance is increasingly used in North America as a cover-all term for any activity that might involve making more money. However, look here for a press release about a type of revenue assurance I have not seen before: preventing “piracy” in the supply of financial information services through activities like the sharing of accounts. The article also describes the loss as a “leakage”. The principle applies well. If two people use the account for the same information resource, the supplier makes half the revenue then if he sold two separate subscriptions, so it should implement checks to stop account sharing.
Though the idea is right, taking revenue assurance to its logical limit may ultimately have a downside. I guess it is only a matter of time before we start talking about “revenue assurance” to stop people sharing their newspapers…
