Amelia Riana: Telco Big Data for Greater Good

The latest study from the Global System for Mobile communications Association (GSMA) in 2019 points out that the use of mobile or telco big data solutions in areas such as disaster response, disease prevention, and financial inclusion could positively impact more than 150 million people over the next five years. The study further outlines how advanced mobile network analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be applied to drive societal impacts supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We sat down with Amelia Riana, the ‘Jack of All Trades’ of Data Solutions Sales & Partnership team at Telkomsel MSIGHT, to talk about how telco big data can make a greater impact. When she joined Telkomsel in 2017, she was a part of the business development team looking for prospective clients, but also supporting the joint sale activity with the Digital Advertising team where she helped them in profiling and query to deliver efficient campaigns for clients. Now, Amel works mostly with government and financial institutions.

Oh, fun fact about Amel: besides her work, Amel loves to run, read, and has a podcast called POSTINOR (definitely worth checking!).

I think we all agree that telco big data, is something that can be a game-changer in the future. So, let’s talk more about it, starting by telling us more about MSIGHT, which is a telco big data division at Telkomsel

MSIGHT is our brand for Data Solutions. Our unit is responsible to help clients to monetize insight using Telco Big Data, to stay ahead in the competition of their respective industry. We have two products: Aggregated & Individual Insight.

The output from aggregated Insight would be a report or analysis of certain use cases, for example, identifying how many people watch an outdoor billboard placement or another example would be Mall traffic. Individual insight is mostly used as a “Verification Service” such as Telco Credit Score, and Location Verification. These two services have helped our clients from the financial service industry to speed up their loan onboarding process. We have one pre-condition for clients to get individual insights, which focuses on data privacy and security of our customers. We follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a best practice in this area.

What are the features of MSIGHT?

· Risk Insight: a business line-up focusing on providing risk-related insights by analyzing telco customers’ behavior

· Mobility Insight: A business line-up focusing on providing mobility (movement and stay-point) insights by analyzing customer’s location when triggering mobile activity

· Lifestyle Insight: A business line-up focusing on providing lifestyle (demographic and interest) insights by analyzing their telco data and customer digital behavior on mobile.

· API Service: A business line-up focusing on providing Application Programming Interface of basic and derivative telco services in the digital marketplace.

What are the benefits for clients of using MSIGHT?

In general, clients will gain quality insight from our rich and robust telco big data. Some of the benefits from MSIGHT are: providing information related to customer risk, mobility, and lifestyle, helping clients gain a competitive advantage through a better understanding of market competition and optimizing costs, and improving clients’ planning and effectiveness, and reduce the risk of default or fraud through an improved authentication process.

To make sure we deliver service excellence, you will also have support from our team that consists of data professional experts coming from different backgrounds and industries. We have experienced people from research, e-commerce, banking, analytics background that will be our clients’ partner in solving their problems.

Can you share with us more about your role at MSIGHT?

The best part of my role at MSIGHT is to ‘bridge the gap’, between clients’ expectations and the internal team’s deliveries. So, I’m a saleswoman as well as a consultant. I always try to put myself in the client’s shoes when working on a project, so that I can feel their pain points.

There was this one time where we worked with a big property developer looking for the right tenants for new malls outside of Jakarta. Using MSIGHT, we analyzed the mall’s traffic and the population in surrounding areas. Then we combined these two variables with socio-economic analysis, based on ARPU (Average Revenue Per Users) and the price of their device. The result was a comprehensive insight that helped them to pick the right tenants that match with the socio-economic profile of the mall’s visitors. They also managed to attract an international fast-fashion brand to open their first store outside Jakarta.

You talked a bit about how telco big data can analyze socio-economic factors. It sounds like telco big data can play a much bigger role than just in a commercial area.

At the moment, our telco big data is positioned as an additional insight or supporting tools for decision-makers to get additional information more relevant and faster. We are not there yet in terms of giving a direct social impact, but we can participate in several use cases in Humanitarian and Development.

For the Humanitarian effort, MIGHT partnered with one of the UN agencies to map mobility patterns pre, during and post-earthquake in Palu, Sigi, and Donggala in Sulawesi. We hope that in the future, more humanitarian, search and rescue, and first responder organizations can utilize telco big data to gain mobility insight to help them get the latest update from ground zero and help them evacuate faster.

Any thoughts about telco big data for the greater good? What is your vision on this?

Besides the example above, I can also see how telco big data can play a bigger role for development, for example for credit risk assessment of the unbanked. Data-driven solutions is not a new thing, but telco big data is something that I believe has so many untapped potentials, especially in the emerging markets.

I personally admire ‘Data for Good’ and their initiatives to empower people through data. I think this what makes the future is exciting, knowing that we can solve social and environmental issues using data science and technology.