Vertek Launches Industry-First Managed Financial-Assurance Program

Vertek Corp. (Booth 1519), a leading provider of business solutions, process outsourcing and business consulting for the telecommunications industry, announced today the release of its Managed Financial Assurance Program (MFAP).

Verteks MFAP is a hosted data management platform offering state-of-the-art analytical tools specifically engineered to acquire, validate and reconcile the accuracy of service providers monthly operating costs and billing, all at a low fixed monthly fee, without CAPEX or integration expenses. MFAP addresses service providers needs for cost management and vendor invoice administration, revenue assurance, product profitability and margin analysis.

Whether you are a CLEC reselling services from multiple partners, or a carrier engaging with a new content provider partner for DSL or IPTV services, chances are you are experiencing some revenue leakage, unnecessary vendor costs and invoice overpayment, said Brad Soutiere, president and COO of Vertek. MFAP resolves these issues while optimizing the operating costs and revenues for new service offerings. Vertek has developed the interoperation, billing reconciliation and settlement standards for this offering that enables service providers to determine the health of their partnerships and to gauge how well their partners are living up to commitments specified in existing contracts and SLAs.

Verteks MFAP removes the considerable time and resources required to administer and process vendor invoicing and charges internally, and gives carriers access to meaningful exceptions and analysis of financial performance.

It finds the source of discrepancies that cause unnecessary costs, record fallout, pervasive data integrity issues, missing accounts and uncollected revenue.

With MFAP, Vertek captures, discovers and automates existing business rules, and streamlines data management routines so that employees and systems operate more efficiently. The system provides the documented proof that service providers need to support dispute claims and have timely credits issued.

MFAP enables customers to monitor the progress of monthly vendor costs, network utilization and customer revenue performance through an online Web portal that offers a comprehensive list of configurable reports including: vendor scorecard, billing account reporting, invoice summary and detail, vendor usage charges, revenue assurance discrepancy and scorecard reporting, customer margin performance, vendor margin performance, carrier traffic analysis and trending, and vendor invoice dispute and settlement tracking.

The typical service provider, large or small, gets files, disks and thousands of pages of invoices from vendors every month with various detailed charges for network access, leased facilities and equipment, new content services, service charges, directory items, to name a few, said Tom Nolting, senior director of Verteks Financial Assurance Services. These invoices need to be rationalized and reconciled with growing volumes of usage transactions, order and inventory records, and contract and enterprise data, often in disparate formats that make it very difficult to match up and validate. MFAP can save service providers millions of dollars by catching billing discrepancies, collecting lost revenues, resolving historical disputes, analyzing contract-to-bill and switch-to-network discrepancies and by reducing customer implementation timeframes.