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BICS’ managed services to protect Bitė Group’s customers against fraud, optimize costs, and improve service quality.
Bitė Group, one of the largest mobile network operators in the Baltics, controlling Bitė Lietuva and Bite Latvija, has concluded a new landmark deal and exclusive contract with international connectivity enabler BICS. The expanded partnership sees BICS handling all international voice traffic on Bitė’s network. Amidst a shifting market for traditional voice calls and ongoing Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) implementation acceleration in Europe, this agreement leverages BICS’ worldwide network and state-of-the-art fraud protection, so Bitė can optimize and channel its resources into developing new services and technologies.
A long-term customer of BICS, this deal now sees BICS become Bitė Lithuania’s sole supplier of voice services. In essence, entrusting all services related to securely passing voice traffic from Bitė’s network across the world. Moving from a multi-carrier to a single-carrier model abstracts away certain complexities to a trusted partner, and allows companies to focus on strategic projects in a more agile and cost-effective way. Within this deal, Bitė also benefits from complete protection of its subscribers and roamers from spam and fraud call risks.
“Voice call trends are changing and are driving us to look for new solutions that, at the same time, provide even stronger protection against remote criminals. Our agreement with BICS will allow Bitė telecommunications companies to provide high-quality international call services, whilst reducing operational complexity,” says Gintas Butėnas, CEO of Bitė Lietuva. “The market for traditional voice calls is changing with the rapid implementation of VoLTE taking place across Europe. The partnership with BICS will provide protection against fraud, while guaranteeing the quality of BICS’ global network. All this will help to optimize and modernize services and develop technological development to the benefit of our customers, who last year performed almost 11 million international calls.”
The landscape for traditional telephone (voice) calls is changing drastically. Voice calls have gone from being the only calling option for customers a few years ago, to being one of many. Popular alternatives include instant messaging, and VoLTE, which is expected to grow by more than 50% every year until 2028. These trends mean operators need to adapt their business models and re-evaluate their operating costs for traditional voice services. This is particularly true in markets such as Europe, where increasing levels of regulation determine price caps on international voice traffic.
“We are delighted to see our long-standing trusted relationship with Bitė progress to this next stage,” says Sophie Greffier, CRO Telco, BICS. “The market for voice services has changed dramatically and this move from Bitė is a strategic response to this. Likewise, BICS, recognizes this and is committed to being the partner of choice for managed voice services and will continue to invest in tools and innovation to provide mobile operators with the best service on the market.”
The gradual commoditization of the voice market in Europe will eventually force most operators to adapt or diversify their offerings. This forward-thinking move from Bitė aims to optimize its business against this changing market, and its customers will see the benefits while the operator will be in a better position to pursue future innovations and developments. This deal with BICS will improve operation costs, reserve operational bandwidth, unlock economies of scale and allow Bitė to leverage BICS’ vast experience in the international voice market. It also means Bitė will benefit from BICS’ extensive anti-fraud offering, including its crowdsourced, AI-platform for detecting and preventing robocalls.