/ Wholesale and Roaming /
Wholesale and roaming operations enable seamless international mobile services through complex global partnerships, but frequent updates, manual processes, and data complexity make maintaining accuracy, compliance, and service quality a continual challenge for operators.
Wholesale and roaming operations are essential for telecom operators, enabling subscribers to use mobile and voice services abroad through partnerships between global MNOs. These relationships are managed via wholesale and roaming agreements and supported by technical and commercial data such as GSMA’s IR.21 and IR.85 documents and wholesale rate sheets.
Managing these processes involves coordination across contract management, technical integration, billing, and service assurance. Frequent network updates, diverse data formats, and manual validation make operations complex and error-prone. Without automation, delays or mistakes can mean customers have problems accessing services, lost revenue for home network operators and visited networks. Maintaining compliance and accurate configurations across hundreds of partners remains an ongoing challenge for wholesale and roaming teams.
The activities of Relationship Management vary whether considering Vendor Management or Wholesale and Roaming operations.
In roaming operations, relationship management plays a key commercial role in maintaining profitable and reliable international connectivity between mobile network operators. It encompasses partner onboarding, contract negotiation, and ongoing performance optimization. Operators assess new partners based on network compatibility and traffic potential, then negotiate agreements covering tariffs, discounts, and service scope. Continuous monitoring of KPIs—such as traffic volumes, quality, and revenue—enables informed decision-making and commercial steering. Relationship managers also oversee fraud prevention, compliance with GSMA standards, and coordination with legal and regulatory teams.
In vendor management, regular performance reviews ensure that supplier relationships deliver consistent value. These reviews assess product and service updates, operational process changes, and billing procedures to maintain alignment between partners. Early identification of changes allows both parties to adapt systems and avoid financial or operational disruptions. This structured, proactive engagement fosters strong, flexible partnerships that can evolve with shifting market and business needs.
Managing Partner Operators is often complex, time-consuming, and prone to human error—especially in roaming operations. The RAEX (Roaming Agreement Exchange) process demands constant handling of IR.21 files containing vital and frequently changing technical data. Manually reviewing, validating, and updating this information across systems like HLRs, SMSCs, and Steering of Roaming platforms requires coordination among multiple teams and can quickly create backlogs. The lack of automation leads to delays, inconsistent configurations, and even roaming outages, resulting in service disruptions and revenue loss. Fragmented processes—relying on spreadsheets and email—further increase the risk of miscommunication and version control issues.
Similarly, vendor management in telecoms often suffers from the same inefficiencies. Manual onboarding, billing reconciliation, and data exchange via emails and static documents create bottlenecks and inconsistencies. Without standardized systems or automation, operators struggle to maintain a single source of truth, causing delays in supplier activation and complicating performance monitoring. These fragmented workflows not only slow operations and increase costs but also expose operators to higher risks, hinder scalability, and weaken overall commercial and operational control.
A single roaming partner network configuration change (e.g. addition of a global title entry for an HSS/HLR) is likely to result in a complex sequence of changes which must be applied to the home Network Configuration.
This often affects several different home network elements, which must be orchestrated carefully to ensure not just that this partner update is correctly configured but also that other existing services are not unnecessarily or adversely affected by the new configuration.
Each partner update change order item may result in configuration commands to add or create configurations in various network elements, or to modify or delete them.
As part of the network configuration process, it may be necessary for stakeholders with adequate authorisations, like network engineers, to approve the execution of commands, and to perform pre-check and post-check validations, together with rollback sequences in case of exceptions.
Upon completion of the network configuration changes for a partner update, and depending upon the service complexity, a series of tests may be performed
to ensure that the service is working as intended and are Ready for Service.
These tests can be executed when a partner reports a problem, as a partner self-service mechanism accessible via a web site or mobile app, or as part of a routine service quality assessment by the CSP.
It may be part of a self-healing network solution or alerting the NOC to failures in configuration. Any errors or quality issues identified during any part of Ready for Service and parallel automation can initiate trouble tickets trigger manual diagnostics or ultimately result in fully automated resolution activities.
Billing activation is a crucial step in onboarding new roaming partners, marking the transition from testing and commercial agreement to live revenue generation. Once technical connectivity and roaming agreements are finalized, billing activation ensures both operators’ billing systems are synchronized for rating, charging, and settlement of roaming traffic. This involves configuring tariffs, discount models, and currencies based on the agreed Inter-Operator Tariffs (IOTs) and validating that Call Detail Records (CDRs) are exchanged and processed correctly. Accurate billing activation guarantees that roaming usage is tracked and invoiced without discrepancies, forming the foundation for transparent financial settlement between partners.
The process also includes verification of end-to-end data flows—ensuring TAP (Transferred Account Procedure) files align with TADIG standards and that clearinghouse or bilateral billing arrangements function properly. Any errors in configuration or data mapping at this stage can result in lost revenue or settlement disputes. Therefore, billing activation requires close collaboration between technical, financial, and commercial teams to confirm rating consistency, proper reconciliation mechanisms, and readiness for live traffic billing. Effective Billing Activation minimizes revenue leakage and supports smooth operational launch for new roaming relationships.
In roaming, the TADIG (Transferred Account Data Interchange Group) process, central to roaming billing and settlement, presents several operational and financial challenges for mobile operators. One major issue is reconciling billing discrepancies caused by variations in CDR (Call Detail Record) formats, field definitions, and data interpretation across different operators. Even minor inconsistencies in how call durations, timestamps, or service types are recorded can lead to revenue leakage, disputes, and lengthy reconciliation cycles. The absence of standardized validation tools and the reliance on manual checks further complicate error detection and resolution.
In addition, managing financial complexities such as multiple currencies, fluctuating exchange rates, and differing tariff structures adds to the challenge. Partner agreements often define unique rating schemes, discount models, and settlement timelines, requiring careful alignment between financial, technical, and contractual systems. Delays or misalignments in applying exchange rates or tariff updates can distort settlement values and trigger cross-operator disputes. Without automation and harmonized data exchange, the TADIG process becomes resource-intensive, error-prone, and slow, ultimately impacting both cash flow and partner relationships.
The Billing use cases are responsible for generating and distributing accurate bills to customers. There are often multiple data sources that must be queried to provide input into the bill generation process, and this often identifies several data quality issues that must be resolved before the bills are created. CORTEX has delivered a 75% reduction in manual effort for billing operations at a European CSP.