This round table was conducted by participants at the Global Telecoms Business 40 under 40 summit
                          
Panellists: 
Chair: Scott Stonham, vice president of marketing at CommuniGate Systems
Panellists:
Julien Ducarroz, chief commercial officer of Orange Romania
Enas Fardan, manager of corporate strategy at Batelco
Mounir Ladki, vice president and general manager of Mycom
Giorgio Miano, vice president and managing director, Europe, at Syniverse 
                            
Scott Stonham: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of MVNOs as a way to deliver telecoms services that are more innovative. How does that change or create new challenges for operators to relate to their customers? What does customer ownership mean to you?
                                 
Julien Ducarroz: In Romania any over the top (OTT) player will find it very difficult to make a business. In Romania we have had 25 years of owning the customer even if we do nothing because we have the billing relationship.
In prepaid we don’t have the European Union law of identification so prepaid is unknown — not from a usage point of view but from social data. For us, passively we own the customer due to the billing relationship but for sure in the long run, new competition will come and be able to move more quickly.
We’re not an incumbent, we’re ten years old but competitors will come, Netflix will come and to these, we will look old technology. I think we’ve invested a lot without taking a lot of lessons out of it, especially in voice. I think we’re lacking useful insight to be implemented.
When I think about voice we are doing a lot of things. On data we are quite blank so, in terms of owning the data, I think we need quickly to invest in knowing better what the customer wants. 
                            
Stonham: You believe you own the customer because of the billing relationship but you lack insight to extend your relationships with them? 
                            
Ducarroz: Yes we are lacking, as soon as the customer leaves the walled garden. 
                            
Giorgio Miano: Julien is in a good situation. The concept of owning the client is a bit old. You have to be able to seduce these customers every day so they choose you. This morning I arrived in London. I look at my smartphone and it can connect to fibre or any OTT service. I have personal experiences there.
My BlackBerry knows I’m in London and starts to suggest what to do, offers deals on hotels, 4G would recognise me in a bar, I’m paying €1,000 per month [to my operator] and it knows all this information about me but it doesn’t offer me that type of personal experience. Today I’m not spending much on OTT providers’ services but I feel they know me more than my operator. 
                            
Mounir Ladki: Yes, my operator just told me what the tariff will be while I’m here. 
                            
Miano: I got a call in New York once at 3am, they woke me up and they knew I was there. I know it’s very difficult for operators but there are definite things that can be overcome. I don’t think ultimately the operators should fight the OTT players, I think there’s a lot that can be done together. I feel so personally attached to my OTT players that I feed them with information about what I do. That information is so useful for an operator. If it can partner, value can be given back. 
                            
Enas Fardan: Seven years ago, the focus was on producing efficiency and generating cost savings, we thought about subscribers maybe once a month. We thought about customer satisfaction, the voice of the customer, maybe once a year. A few years back, when competition entered the market, things changed dramatically and customer numbers in and out were monitored daily.
We went through a reactive loyalty phase. The core asset is the customers not networks, if you lose customers, you lose the whole game. The technical part is that you have the customer, you have the network and you have the billing relationship — you have these tangible things but the other challenge is the emotional part. Does the customer feel they are part of your brand? All of these emotional aspects are very difficult but they are the glue to the customer and increase stickiness. 
                            
Stonham: If you have that data what do you do with it? Could OTTs and operators share customer data? 
                            
Fardan: OTTs know customers better than operators but if we know any information they don’t, we’d keep it. The OTT business model is totally different; they’re offering the content to free to our customer base and gaining their data. As customers, we feel proud of Google being our search engine; we’re actually pushing our data to OTTs as a consequence. Equally, we pay operators for connectivity which we think is inflated. 
                            
Ducarroz: I partially agree. I believe much more in open APIs and challenge whether it’s OTTs or other business models. Advertising is another area of opportunity but it’s very difficult [for an advertiser] to only run a campaign on an Orange network alone. To sell advertising effectively you have to have 80% market share, you can’t do it with 40%. I still believe there is less ownership at the personal level but we have ownership on usage. We use an application on the SIM that monitors usage of the customer. When a customer sends 10 SMSs we can send an option to increase that to 15. If they’ve never used data before we can make a proposal. I believe we should not give in to OTTs but they are more scalable to us so we cannot defend everything. 
                            
Miano: We believe there is a space for enterprises to find pricing models that work out and for operators to find ways of getting high revenues from their own business. In terms of OTT players, some are well funded and have a lot of money and have very creative people inside, others are in garages. I think the effort is to find ways to collaborate with them. For Google, it’s kind of late – they have so much power – so you need to see which companies are the next Google. 
                            
Ladki: When we talk about additional revenues the operators all, always talk about Google and FaceBook. As a subscriber, why would I stay with a service provider today? Why not move? It’s because I feel a sort of security, I want a reliable company and I trust my operator to bill me correctly. Most operators today aren’t competing with content providers at all even for basic things such as weather forecasts. They’re not pushing this actively but they can [participate in future collaboration in other verticals such as healthcare. 
                            
Stonham: It comes down to segmentation. Your reason to stay or go is different to my 16 year old cousin. That’s why I think MVNOs are going to be more successful. Operators are evolving from competing on handset and price and focusing on business users to add security and trust on top. 
                            
Miano: Young people want a provider that is hugely innovative. Users in general are talking about dropping service providers but OTTs are using their networks for money to be made for someone else. 
                            
Fardan: In the Middle East we haven’t spoken about net neutrality, it’s a big obstacle to operators. If it hadn’t been forced into operators this model would not happen. Operators need to expand their brands into new sources of revenue, this will help them to own the customer. There will be more and more subscriber segmentation and there will be more activity to identify what type of activities they’re spending on. It could be M2M, it could be ewallets, operators have the opportunity to be the enabler of all of these. We have a big asset which is the brand and the more services we provide, the more stickiness we put into our customers. 
                            
Stonham: That’s an interesting point about the strong brand. I had a friend in Vodafone’s CEO’s office who worked there in the late 1990s on the project between Vodafone and Microsoft to embed APIs into Excel and Word documents and make them usable on mobile devices. They got through the technical challenge but the thing that killed the project was the brand under which it would be provided. You had two big egos butting against each other and neither could agree. GTB