In 2024, the CEO of Proximus Group Guillaume Boutin set out an ambitious strategy. The Belgian incumbent highlighted the 30% of revenues that came from outside Belgium and stated publicly that his target was to make sure that half Proximus Group’s revenues came from places where Proximus has no network deployments by the end of the decade.
This puts Jorn Vercamert in the hotseat to deliver some aggressive growth. A veteran at BICS, in May Vercamert was appointed Chief Product Officer at Proximus Global, the combined entity for Proximus’ assets outside Belgium – BICS, Telesign and Route Mobile. So, how’s he going to do that?
Mapping the Territory
Many people in the industry are familiar with BICS as a global provider of roaming, interoperability and interconnect services.
“eSIM technology is also in the space, and we’re super active in providing the best connectivity solutions,” Vercamert pointed out.
But do Telesign and Route Mobile add to what BICS does, or have they just been bundled together because they’re not based in Belgium? Vercamert sees complementarities in targeting enterprise customers.
“Adding Telesign propels us further in leveraging AI to analyze our extensive data, enabling us to provide valuable insights. Telesign is helping all digital brands to deliver secure transactions, onboarding, and registrations. They are a vital security angle in helping enterprises manage their digital business,” he explained.
“Then Route Mobile adds to our offering by providing omnichannel orchestration. The CPaaS platform boosts customer engagement and supports various customer care use cases.”
In other words, the capabilities encompass IoT Connectivity, Security, data analytics, and application management.
So what should we make of that? It’s a world away from the typical telco experience, both in terms of the offering and the fact that it’s not tied to a specific location.
Moreover, if those companies’ offerings can be successfully combined there are all the pieces there to serve telcos with all kinds of offerings as-a-service beyond roaming, but also to go direct to enterprise customers or potentially even direct to consumers. That gives a whole lot of opportunity… but also means that potentially anyone is also a competitor. So where does Vercamert go with this?
Building Custom
“This is a very good question, because we bump into that as well,” he mused.
“I think stepping into the consumer space… at the moment it’s not on the table. We’re not a company at this moment with the assets and knowledge to manage a consumer business. Also, marketing-wise it’s heavy to build the brand.”
So where are they planning to play, then?
“Our core segments are Communications Service Providers, Global Solutions Providers, Digital Global Enterprises, Hyperscalers and Global Software providers.”
The telco segment makes sense; not only because of BICS’ background, but because the roaming industry as a whole is set to grow dramatically over the next few years. Juniper Research predicted a few months ago that global roaming revenues would grow from $9bn in 2024 to $20bn in 2028. That’s clearly a good opportunity to leverage, but Vercamert was keen to point out that it isn’t the only element.
“I think there is a lot of interest in network APIs. We have vast expertise in this area and are currently evaluating how to expose it via APIs. We’ve been using APIs with Telesign for 20 years. The identity products rely on API integrations with multiple MNOs. So in many ways, this isn’t new territory for us, and we clearly see the monetisation opportunities.”
Those last few words are pretty crucial. Finding ways to turn new capabilities into money is a valuable asset today, when telcos are under huge cost pressures.
“I think aggregation is something that can help them be much more efficient, lean and mean in the way they try to monetise,” Vercamert said.
“I think the MNO always wants to do everything himself and I think they need to be a bit more drastic in asking “What do I do myself? I should open my network, but then to commercialise it, to aggregate it and to get it embedded in new industries, I’m not good at that.””
While many telcos talk about providing platforms for services, this is essentially what Proximus Global is doing. Not only for the telcos, either. On the enterprise side, they work a great deal with companies providing solutions and middleware rather than directly to the end-user enterprise.
“UCaaS companies, CPaaS companies, that’s the kind of middle segment I see that is also really core to us. Sometimes we are in competition but that’s been the business for most of us, and especially in the wholesale side, for a long time.”
Fast and Slow
As Proximus Global’s Chief Product Officer, Vercamert sits in a curious position bridging the technology and commercial teams. TelcoForge couldn’t help but ask about the dynamic between the different elements and the pressures that that creates for the product team. Do they have to turn technology initiatives into revenues, or do they get to lead the network side?
“I think that I have a bit of a different view when it comes to new technology,” Vercamert began.
“I think we can talk about how MNOs look at that; how they work with big CapEx and OpEx plans, and budgets, and yearly financials, and quarterly results coming in. And then I feel like there are tons of start-ups that that have taken a space where you say, ‘My God, they’re beautiful things because they’re fast, lean and mean, they incubate product-led development, iterate with their users and improve the service.’ And there’s a very big difference.
“I think we do a bit of both, depending. Introducing our 5G Standalone signaling hub, we’re serious about that and it’s a network thing; you know, we need to test it well, then it has to work because otherwise you can’t deliver that one with trial and error. But on the other hand, if we feel like, “OK, hang on, there is a developer community, there is an opportunity in the identity space or in the data space” we can go much, much quicker.”
There is an irony here, insofar as Vercamert is pointing to community-coordinated and platform-based activities as being the faster option. Maybe that’s in part due to the acceptance of trial and error, but is there a lesson here for the telecoms industry writ large?
“If we think about earlier initiatives, I remember those days of RCS 10 years ago. SCS is a much better product than SMS, I think nobody challenges that. It didn’t go because of ubiquity problems and hesitation between one island or another island.
“So I think the telco industry lets opportunities go because they don’t jointly say “OK, we’ll do it together, we’ll build the infrastructure and we understand that there’s no point in building the infrastructure on one island and not on the other island.” And so I wonder how that could make a stronger strategy for the telco world. It’s a hard topic because every company has its own P&L, its own ownership, its own priorities and so on and so on.
“But when you think of the value that we can bring as an industry to fraud and security, in latency, in autonomous vehicles, in health industries; if you think of the travel and hospitality industry. We have the potential and opportunity to drastically increase the quality of customer journeys and heavily reduce operating costs for many industries.”
