04 March 2025

Safaricom has taken another step on its journey of digital transformation with Huawei’s Convergent Billing Solution.

Safaricom recently upgraded to the latest version, which is fully cloud-native and features embedded AI to provide an agile base for future services, allowing it to continuously improve system performance, reliability, stability, and intelligence. This will allow the operator to support customer service growth for its 50 million subscribers, as well as enabling innovative options for monetization.

The latest iteration of Huawei’s Convergent Billing Solution increases billing capacity by 40%, now able to support up to 70 million users, and reduces bill run duration by 65% – a significant increase to the billing efficiency. Additionally, the solution recovers more quickly from disruptions to minimize the impact on customers – for example, upgrade patches can be rolled out with zero downtime, and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) have been reduced from around 5-15 minutes to just 30 seconds. CBS R23 is more open than previous iterations, supporting 200 restful interfaces, which means developers can create new applications for the system more easily. In addition to its new 2B features, the system features a swathe of enhancements around enterprise billing.

Safaricom is also using CBS’ AIOPS capabilities such as Fault Correlation Analysis and Visualized Topology to drive innovation, and is exploring a joint innovation project with Huawei based on the vendor’s Idea to Cash platform, aimed at accelerating monetisation via AI technology. The AI Platform is based on Huawei’s Telecom Foundation Model which can support service innovation from accelerating new service go to market and precise smart recommendation, resulting in faster time to revenue.

A pilot project has already taken place with Huawei and Safaricom, focused on users who only use free data, and therefore do not generate additional revenue. The innovation identifies Trigger Conditions – e.g. the user reaching the daily limit on their free data allowance – then recommends a smart offer via a flash USSD notification. The recommendation is based on the size, price and validity of the required data allowance, and the user can buy the package directly from the USSD notification, making it better suited to this task than an SMS notification. By using this AI model to recommend the best package at the most appropriate time, Safaricom has seen a 12% conversion rate significant from 3% over traditional mechanism, yielding a 24% increase in ARPU.

“This success of this project has set a great example for future projects. We are very happy to have cooperated with Safaricom in Convergent Billing Solution for over 13 years. In the future, we look forward to working closely with Safaricom to provide better services and experience for end users in the intelligent era,” said Wei Zhuang, Vice President of Software Business Dept, Huawei.