2024: The MATRIXX Year in Review

2024 has been a landmark year for MATRIXX as we celebrated a major milestone — our 15th birthday in February. A little over 15 years ago, the founding team of MATRIXX set out on a transformative mission to disrupt the status quo in telecom. Having already achieved success in the early 1990s with Portal Software, the first real-time billing system for the internet, Dave Labuda and team saw an even greater opportunity on the horizon. As the world embraced the iPhone in 2007 and the “app economy” in 2008, they recognized the need for a revolutionary way to manage customer and billing relationships in real-time. This vision laid the foundation for MATRIXX, bringing to life a platform that reimagined real-time customer and financial experiences.

As we reflect on this, our fifteenth year, it feels like the right time to summarize a few significant achievements. I’d like to highlight the strides that our customers have made in forging partnerships, enhancing their customer experiences and driving innovation to meet the evolving needs of the telecoms market.

Strengthening Global Partnerships

Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications provider, was an early believer in MATRIXX and deployed our charging platform in 2014 to provide enhanced, real-time customer experiences for their mobile subscribers. With greater visibility into their usage and spend, NPS grew by +11 in just three months, ARPU grew by 5% and data usage-related call center complaints dropped by 40%. Since then, there has been no looking back, and MATRIXX has been a part of their ongoing digital transformation, expanding to provide monetization for consumer and enterprise fixed and mobile services and IoT devices.

Over the years, MATRIXX’s customer base has grown steadily, and this year we welcomed a few notable telcos to our family. In October, Telenor, a prominent telecommunications provider in the Nordics, selected MATRIXX as their strategic monetization solution. Serving 10 million customers across Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, Telenor aims to standardize operations across these markets by deploying our platform for converged rating and charging to replace disparate legacy systems with a unified, simplified MATRIXX solution.
November brought a new partnership with OXIO, a leading Telecom-as-a-Service (TaaS) provider. By integrating MATRIXX into their cloud native TaaS platform, OXIO will empower organizations to extend their brands by embedding mobile services at scale without the constraints of legacy telecom. OXIO chose MATRIXX because of our inherent flexibility, ease of configurability and the ability to support multiple business models from a single platform. These are critical factors for their mission to help their customers launch any number of distinct connectivity offers and services across markets and geographies at scale.

Advancing Industry Standards to Accelerate Innovation

This year, MATRIXX continued its commitment to the TM Forum, a global industry association driving digital transformation for service providers. We actively participated in three Catalyst projects showcased at Digital Transformation World (DTW) ’24 in Copenhagen. Each project highlighted a unique approach to leveraging real-time monetization data, large language models (LLMs) and AI-driven processes to drive customer experience and revenue growth. We are proud to have won the “Outstanding Catalyst – AI and Automation” award for our contributions, further reinforcing our leadership in driving industry innovation.

The “Real-Time Intelligent Customer Experiences” project, in collaboration with STC, Bell Canada and Vodafone, demonstrated how unifying data from multiple sources with AI and automation can generate customer recommendations in response to behavioral changes or service issues. The “AI-Powered Sustainable Smart Farming” project, developed in partnership with Telefónica and NTT, showcased the role of AI and data analytics in driving sustainability with smart farming solutions that adjust product offerings dynamically to optimize crop production and resource efficiency. Finally, the “AI Chat Agent: The Game-Changer for Telecoms” project, created in partnership with SK Telecom and Omantel, explored how AI-powered chatbots can transform customer interactions, enabling product and offer changes during chatbot interactions while driving operational efficiency and EBITDA improvements. These Catalyst projects underscore MATRIXX’s dedication to advancing industry standards and fostering innovation in telecommunications.

MATRIXX has also continued its steadfast commitment to 3GPP standards, serving as the chair of the SA5 Charging Working Group. This dedication ensures our solutions remain at the forefront of industry best practices, driving innovation and consistency in telecom monetization worldwide. This facilitates integration with the CSP’s evolving network assets and unlocks their ability to monetize new network functions as they are released. Our latest MATRIXX platform release, for example, supports 3GPP R17 network functions that significantly extend telco charging capabilities, including CEF, NWDAF/Analytics and MANO/LSO.

Industry Innovations and New Business Models

5G SA network advancements and rollouts continue at pace. With network slice innovations on the brink of commercialization, telcos are on the verge of unlocking new revenue streams and operational efficiencies. Additionally, there has been substantial movement in exposing and monetizing APIs. MATRIXX has been working with customers to establish monetization platforms for these new B2B2X relationships, enabling telcos to create new partnerships and revenue opportunities.

5G network services are more complex and there is a growing expectation from enterprises for complete visibility and transparency into the value they are getting. As they sign up for guaranteed service levels, they want to know what they are getting. As a Telstra executive recently said, “demonstration of value is as important as the network slice orchestration itself.”

Looking Ahead

As we move forward, MATRIXX Software remains committed to innovation and excellence. Our focus is on delivering cutting-edge solutions that empower our partners and customers to thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape. We are excited about the future and the opportunities it holds for continued growth and collaboration.

Thank you for being a part of our journey. Here’s to a successful year and many more to come.

If you’d like to connect, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out with your thoughts, feedback or just to say hello!

Jennifer Kyriakakis
Founder, Chief Marketing Officer