How Convergent Billing & Settlement Helps Operators Navigate the Transition from TAP to BCE
Billing and Charging Evolution (BCE) is right around the corner. Operators are accelerating the deployment of BCE due to growing concerns about competitive disadvantages, as well as the surge in 5G Standalone (SA) and IoT roaming traffic (source: Kaleido Intelligence, 2025). BCE unlocks many powerful new charging models and revenue streams that operators can benefit from, sooner rather than later.
BCE adoption is growing steadily, but the TAP (Transfer Account Procedures) system is still widely used. According to Kaleido Intelligence estimates, BCE settlements reached $338M in 2024 and are expected to exceed $1B by 2026. Early adopters of BCE benefit from operational efficiencies and greater commercial leverage, gaining an advantage in shaping settlement practices that align with next-generation roaming demands. This period, while they wait for other operators to transition to BCE, is what is known as the hybrid settlement period.
MACH’s One Agreement solution is a convergent billing and settlement platform that combines TAP and BCE agreements into a single view. It helps guide operators through this hybrid settlement period and along the transition from TAP to BCE. It not only streamlines settlement but also enables faster, scalable wholesale operations through its comprehensive business intelligence platform, One BI. One Agreement leverages MACH’s TAP expertise in the here and now, allowing operators to benefit from additional charging models such as IMSI-based agreements using TAP files. While providing TAP support in the present, it also helps operators simplify BCE adoption. Below are a few of the main challenges facing operators on the journey to BCE, and how One Agreement can help solve them:
Future of Settlement
Challenge: Lagging BCE Adoption
TAP was designed to support voice calls, where there was no need to differentiate devices or network technologies. It lacks the flexibility to handle the new charging models that operators hope to use to address new technologies and connectivity needs for 5G SA and IoT roaming. While BCE offers unparalleled flexibility, its market penetration has been slow. Besides ongoing deliberations regarding specific charging models, Roaming Hub, and Sponsored Roaming, among other important topics ; operators struggling to implement BCE face the following roadblocks:
- Difficulties creating Detailed Data Reports (DDRs).
- Reliance on TAP-driven reports.
- Overall lack of BCE knowledge.
One Agreement: Unified Contract
One Agreement offers an integrated application to manage all commercial contracts in one place, combining multiple agreements into a single view. This reduces tedious navigation between agreements, significantly improving usability for roaming managers and finance teams. The ability to view BCE and TAP-based agreements in a single view enables a seamless transition toward BCE. MACH’s expertise in BCE, including DDR creation, simplifies the complexity of BCE deployment.
In addition, One Agreement supports contracts that span multiple years, cover different customer segments, such as retail and enterprises, and allow the definition of shared revenue or traffic commitments. This enables operators to zoom out from individual agreements to manage their partners' relationships more effectively.
Commitments
Challenge: Multiple Commitments
Many operators are merging IoT and retail agreements into a single revenue commitment. While this offers increased business flexibility, it creates a complex challenge for finance teams to perform calculations from various billing sources, usually using outdated spreadsheets or third-party tools. This causes significant issues when disputes are raised, and users need the ability to drill-down into individual transaction details.One Agreement: Cross-Commitment
One Agreement can easily combine IoT and retail agreements under a single contract into a unified settlement calculation and report. This offers increased flexibility for roaming managers during discount agreement negotiations and removes the heavy lift from finance users with automated accrual and settlement reports.
Dispute Resolution
Challenge: Billing Discrepancies and Disputes
Financial Clearing Houses (FCH) rely on detailed information, only available in BCE, for dispute resolution. Since BCE provides consolidated BSRs to FCH, it has limited insights into the traffic and costs exchanged per network operator, service, and period. This creates a heavy dependence on BCE reporting capabilities for finance users, including discrepancy reports.One Agreement: Cross-Settlement
One Agreement offers unified data across all clearing services. It supports an automated dispute and reconciliation process, along with consolidated invoices for all roaming services per partner relationship. This gives operators peace of mind knowing that One Agreement’s single source of truth removes any discrepancies that can turn dispute resolution into a lengthy and costly process.
Reporting & Analytics
Challenge: Segmented Reporting
The roaming industry has long depended heavily on reporting, with an ongoing need for analytics to monitor deal performance, financial accruals, budgeting, and revenue assurance. However, the extensive market segmentation caused by IoT has reduced operators’ visibility and made managing roaming relationships more complex than ever. Operators lack IMSI-detailed reporting on all their different offerings. This has a significant impact on existing systems that struggle to adapt to BCE aggregated reporting.One Agreement: Unified Analytics
Leverage One Agreement’s unified analytics platform (One BI) for improved financial control, margin visibility, and business predictability. One BI also provides robust revenue assurance, which is especially valuable to operators during the hybrid settlement period.
One BI features AI-powered report assistance to help users find meaningful insights, generate easy-to-use reports and visualizations, perform complex calculations instantly, make more informed decisions with data-driven recommendations, and reduce operators' knowledge gap.
Billing
Challenge: Multiple Billing
Operators run the risk of having multiple and often siloed billing systems for the same purpose. In some cases, Excel is still used, which requires continuous manual efforts. This leads to significant operational inefficiencies and contributes to higher OPEX.One Agreement: Convergent Billing
One Agreement offers consolidated settlement for TAP, BCE, and IOT discounts, enabling seamless and automated operations, improved allocations, and optimized cash flow.
One Agreement provides operators with more automation, which saves manual efforts, and helps prevent errors. This all-in-one solution makes the difficult and complex adoption of BCE simple and approachable for operators, regardless of knowledge level.
MACH focuses on simplifying billing complexities to help operators manage their business more efficiently. We are experts in both TAP and BCE, dedicated to helping operators navigate their BCE deployment journey. Get in touch with us to learn more about BCE or to schedule a demo of One Agreement.
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