WeDo, the Portuguese-based business assurance vendor, have announced the release of version 7 of their RAID business assurance suite; see here.
The pitch is glossy. First impressions are that you could be visiting Apple’s website, not least because RAID’s attractive dashboards and reports are shown displayed on a variety of Macs and iPads. But whilst WeDo are pushing RAID’s improved interface, what will really matter is the popularity of the new features under the hood. These include recalculation of xDRs, which WeDo describes as ‘rating validation’. Recalculation is a kind of testing that has been around for a long while but has never really appealed to that many RA departments, so it will be interesting to see whether this matters more to WeDo’s existing customers, or if it is a way to reach new customers. WeDo has linked this to its new ‘billing validation’ capability, which makes it sound like the two are closely related. However, billing validation is described as:
comparing the customer’s historical behavior and statistical data to any additional sources and the invoice itself, at both an aggregated and a detailed level.
In other words, what WeDo calls ‘billing validation’ is the kind of clever re-use of fraud detection techniques that should have become standard for RA teams – but which many real-life RA teams do not use. Comparing the current bill to historical and statistical data might indicate fraud, or it might indicate an accidental error in how the bill has been processed. So here the vendor is intelligently joining the dots, through its product, in ways that telcos sometimes fail to do with their internal processes.
WeDo is also trumpeting the upgrade to RAID’s fraud detection capabilities, but it would be hard to form an opinion about this without examining the system in use. Their pitch is the inclusion of “new pre-built scenarios and detection techniques”. It is interesting they then list a series of telecoms-specific frauds, as WeDo’s overall push is much broader than the telecoms market. The promotional material identifies four sectors that will be served by RAID. Alongside telcos, WeDo are promoting the use of RAID in retailers, energy companies and financial companies. Reading between the lines, the order of this list may have some significance. Whilst telcos continue to be the heart of the customer base, the oft-projected crossover of RA into the finance sector may have been significantly overhyped. Margin-conscious retailers may turn out to be far more receptive to innovative enhancement of analysis and assurance in areas like stock management and the supply chain.
