Fraud is big business, costing the global economy an estimated US $5 trillion per annum, according to a report by Crowe and the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies. It is a problem no one can afford to ignore, as businesses and consumers struggle with the direct cost and associated disruption to economic life. Most worryingly, the incidence of fraud has increased as a result of mass digital adoption during COVID-19. This Viewpoint explains why a business-as-usual approach to managing fraud simply won’t do.

The international carrier industry has not brought much satisfaction over the past years. Traditional international carrier products are suffering low growth or are in structural decline, while service and asset innovators emerging in the adjacencies are making a mark in value creation. Telecom groups could have captured those trends through their international wholesale departments or subsidiaries, but their potential as trend hunters has been hindered by fragmentation or missing purpose.

The cloud is the playing field of the digital economy. However, most financial services companies have only been able to scratch the surface. Working within its existing operating practices and vendor ecosystem, it seems impossible to look beyond the lowest-hanging fruit. We make the case that it is time to try something new.

In the recent past, information technologies operated in static infrastructure silos. However, mass adoption of the cloud delivery model has irreversibly changed enterprises’ expectations of how IT infrastructure services should be built, provisioned and priced.

Given the speed of technology cycles, new flexible production architectures are a prerequisite to driving the pace of product innovation and transforming operations.

A geographically diverse set of Tier 1 carriers is driving initiatives to standardize critical components of network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN). Led by AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, NTT, Telefonica and Verizon, among others, these carriers hope to bring new technologies first developed and proven in the data center into their networks. The excitement over NFV and SDN has created renewed interest in the networking business and has fanned debate regarding potential winners and losers. So far, however, there has been only limited analysis of the potential economic and competitive impact of these technologies on the network, operations and the bottom-line.

Carrier’s the world over are actively investing to find their niche in cloud services to drive growth, but few can claim success. Building a credible cloud service will require to fully understand the market potential for public, private cloud and related services. Potential entrants need to analyze how cloud technology will shape the market, what are the required technology and software capabilities and how to create a win-win situation through alliances.

Over the last decades most global companies have evolved to organize their innovation efforts through an “open innovation” model with individual research centers. Globalization and mergers & acquisitions have changed these networks, making them more complex to manage successfully. A robust capability assessment is the starting point for capturing synergies, fostering cross-center collaboration and steering critical make-or-buy and resource allocation decisions in the right direction. This article shows how this can be done.