Case Study: SLA Digital enabling mobile payments for Zain Kuwait customers

Executive Summary

Zain, the leading mobile telecommunications company in Kuwait uses SLA Digital’s digital services platform to enable mobile payments for their customers. By utilizing SLA Digital’s platform, Zain are able to offer their customers carrier billing which is a convenient, seamless and secure mobile payment option for buying online goods and services.

About Zain Kuwait

Zain Kuwait is the largest mobile operator in Kuwait with 37% market share and over 2.7 million customers. In the past, mobile operators relied on traditional voice and messaging service revenues until Over-the-top (OTT) players entered the market and began to erode their revenue streams. Mobile operators began to look for ways to drive new revenue streams through services such as mobile payments and value-added services.

The Challenge

The mobile payments industry was showing no signs of slowing down and technology began to make people’s lives more convenient and faster paced. Mobile operators, like Zain Kuwait, needed to be able to offer their customers a convenient and secure mobile payment option but with their existing legacy billing systems in place, this would have been time consuming and costly to implement themselves.

How Zain Kuwait solved it with SLA Digital

Zain Kuwait implemented SLA Digital’s platform to enable the mobile payment option, carrier billing. Carrier billing allows customers to purchase digital content and charge it to their mobile bill. SLA Digital’s platform utilizes API management and acts as an API gateway with integrated management portals, reporting and customer care functionality. SLA Digital’s expertise and experience in this area made them a perfect fit for this project.

Partner Solution

SLA Digital offered Zain Kuwait a managed service solution which significantly reduced risk and allowed SLA Digital to manage the entire process from technical integration to business development, committing to maximising revenues for all parties. The SLA Digital platform was designed to be entirely flexible and dynamic, using a sophisticated suite of tools to tailor the platform to the customer’s needs.

Initially starting out using EC2, the platform has evolved along with AWS. As transaction volume increased, SLA Digital made extensive use of ElastiCache and EC2 auto scaling and moved their self-managed PostgreSQL database to RDS to remove some of the burden of managing backups and failover.

Given that SLA Digital are a payments company, analytics and data are central to what they do, and they are using Redshift and QuickSight to make data available across their organisation.

As SLA Digital continue to evolve and strive to provide the best possible solution to Zain Kuwait, they continue to implement new services from AWS.

Results/Benefits

Zain Kuwait are able to offer their customers a simple and secure mobile payment option. This has enabled the mobile operator to drive new revenue streams to compensate for declining voice and messaging services. SLA Digital’s platform helped the mobile operator move faster, lower IT costs and scale the project to make it a success.

“As our chosen aggregator we trust SLA Digital to seamlessly manage everything when it comes to carrier billing. The reliability of their platform and the team’s understanding and expertise is excellent. We happily continue to work with SLA Digital as they help us advance in the market.”

Muzamil Shaikh, Wholesale & Partner Relations Director, Zain Kuwait