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We caught up with Amol Gadre, Founder and CEO of Sarathi Softech, to discuss why flexibility is an integral feature of the company’s AI-enabled telco billing platform, EarnBill, and how it is helping telecom operators and MVNOs stay ahead in an increasingly complex market.
From 5G and the IoT, to AI and personalised services, each year the telecoms sector continues to grow more complex. This offers a huge challenge for telco billing systems, particularly for those largescale telcos with slow-moving legacy systems that can act as bottlenecks for innovation.
For Gadre, these limitations were front-of-mind when developing Sarathi’s EarnBill platform, a core billing engine focussed on fast implantation and flexibility. Backed by over 13 years of Enterprise jBilling partnership and more than $2 billion in processed billing and payments, EarnBill has been built and battle-tested for precisely this moment.
“The big legacy systems for Tier 1 telcos mean implementations can be multi-year,” Gadre said. “We try to cut such implementation times by as much as half through our own agility.”
This agility is not just a matter of project management and efficiency in deployment. As the market moves towards increasingly complex data models and products, the billing system must be as flexible as the network itself.
“Take the data bank offering in Australia, for example, where unused monthly data allowance is ‘banked’ for use in later months,” said Gadre. “These kinds of offers are gaining popularity because they give customers a lot of flexibility. However, introducing innovative offerings like this requires a backend that is quickly customisable”.
Of course, building a billing system with this level of flexibility is no easy task, particularly given legacy constraints. EarnBill, however, benefits from the fact that it did not originate in the telco sphere, but rather enterprise billing through the jBilling platform. This gives it a level of flexibility not typically seen in more specialised telco billing systems.
“EarnBill is a ‘no assumptions made’ core billing engine,” explained Gadre, noting it can be applied to various domains, from mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. “It’s not a platform that we have inherited from an existing telco system. Instead, it was built from the ground up to meet the needs of various domains including telcos, SaaS, IoT and IaaS amongst others.”
“Telcos are offering innovative plans in a competitive market. It’s EarnBill’s job to ensure they can come up with innovative offerings in a short amount of time,” he added.
Leveraging AI to plug leaking revenue
Naturally, AI plays a key role in EarnBill’s ongoing evolution in the telco sector. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has long been a core feature of efficient and autonomous billing systems, allowing them to handle complex operational workflows with limited human intervention.
The recent development of agentic AI is showing a lot of promise of making this automation more intelligent. The autonomous AI agents can analyse data, make decisions, and execute tasks across workflows with minimal human intervention – this development marks a significant shift towards a more fluid and intelligent model. Specialised AI agents can dynamically review tariffs, suggest dispute resolution options in real time, and help personalise charges based on individual usage patterns and context, providing the much-needed agility.
“AI has sped up this automation process, with agentic AI taking over certain aspects of daily operations,” said Gadre. “Today, these processes are somewhere in the middle, where you have part automation, part human handling. We will see more and more of these processes handed over to AI agents as the technology matures. EarnBill would help operators make this transition.”
With telco complexity growing rapidly, stemming revenue leakage is emerging as a key initial target for these agents.
“We’re using automation to report billing errors in real time,” he said, emphasising that this not only saved telcos money but ultimately improved the end customer’s experience.
From services to full stack BSS
Ultimately, Gadre’s goal is for Sarathi to leverage AI to move up the value chain and begin offering a full stack BSS solution for telco customers.
Crucially, Gadre emphasizes that this platform must remain service oriented. In an industry where vendors often force operators to change their business processes to fit the software, EarnBill intends to remain the inverse.
“We don’t want to make our clients learn our platform and use it in a way where they need to change how their business operates,” Gadre concludes. “We have a very flexible system and a platform that is still evolving to cater to their needs as seamlessly as possible.”
For telcos looking to innovate and differentiate themselves from their competition, flexible, intelligent billing will only grow in importance.
Sarathi Softech is a Pune-based billing and revenue management specialist with over 15 years of deep expertise in Enterprise jBilling.
→ Visit earnbill.com/contact-us/
