Think you are paying too much for your mobile phone? Try Bill Monitor!
Posted by Guillame Foutry @ June 25th, 2009 in 77Interview
Dr. Stelios Koundouros is the Director and Founder of Optimor, which has generated a new kind of price comparison search engine for mobile phone contracts, Bill Monitor. Stelios heads Optimor’s efforts since 2005. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge University. He accepted to answer our questions on Bill Monitor:
Guillaume Foutry: How long has your startup (Optimor) been in operation?
Dr. Stelios Koundouros: The company was founded in 2005. We spent two years analyzing large mobile data sets and building our core predictive technology and analytical infrastructure. We then teamed up with The Accelerator Group (TAG) in 2007, producing our website and software in 2008. We launched the website in late 2008 and have seen the traffic increasing since, Bill Monitor having reached 25,000 users in May 2009, all driven by positive press coverage and word of mouth.
GF: How would you describe your tool, Bill Monitor?
Dr. Stelios Koundouros: Bill Monitor is a personal adviser on deals on the mobile phone market that analyzes customers’ individual usage patterns found in their itemised bills to provide them with the most personalised recommendations regarding their needs.
GF: Can you explain how it works?
Dr. Stelios Koundouros: The person willing to use Bill Monitor gives us access to his/her online billing account with their mobile operator. Bill Monitor then reads their historic usage and generates forecasts of their potential future behaviour based on the historic consumption of the user. It then runs each forecast through thousands of tariffs looking at the cost of every single call to identify the most suitable deal on the mobile phone market for this user. Alternatively, the user makes a self-assessment of his/her consumption.
GF: What is the main difference between Bill Monitor and a classic price comparison website?
Dr. Stelios Koundouros: Well, there are several differences:
- We analyze the actual bill of the user – offering personalised advice based on the user’s actual usage patterns
- We have spent several years developing an algorithm that provides very accurate prediction based on the user’s pattern of consumption
- We examine every level of consumption (national calls, international calls, text, roaming, picture message, contract type) and we recommend users mobile contracts with all add-ons which are relevant to their consumption and will effectively reduce their bills.
Thus, we provide a personal recommendation based on a global assessment of the consumption of the user.
GF: What does the Ofcom accreditation mean for Bill Monitor?
Dr. Stelios Koundouros: Ofcom, the national regulator for telecommunications, examines price comparison calculators in the mobile and telecommunications industry (They define themselves as “an independent organisation which regulates the UK’s broadcasting, telecommunications and wireless communications sectors.” They “also set and enforce rules on fair competition between companies in these industries”). Bill Monitor is the only mobile comparison calculator which has earned accreditation by Ofcom, this accredits the following four elements:
- The impartiality of the Bill Monitor service
- The accuracy of Bill Monitor
- The transparency of Bill Monitor (how Bill Monitor provides the results)
- The comprehensiveness of the tariffs compared by Bill Monitor
The certificate has been a recognition of our work and shows users they can trust Bill Monitor and its results.
GF: How have the mobile carriers greeted you? Have you felt any form of hostility or resistance?
Dr. Stelios Koundouros: We communicate with them and they perceive the value of the tool for their business and we will probably find a way to collaborate together. They can use Bill Monitor to improve their CRM system, or make their billing services more efficient, so we offer something that is complementary to what they do.
GF: Where are you going next? What do you plan to do, both for the tool and your company?
Dr. Stelios Koundouros: Our priority at the moment is to enhance the service as we plan to add multiple merchants such as the Carphone Warehouse and to include pay as you go deals. Above all as we have been in operations for a couple of months now we have accumulated enough feedback from our users to improve the website and to make it even more useful to them.
In the midterm we think of branching into other services where we could bring our expertise, like electricity deals.
Regarding our company, we are considering a series A funding round and we are in talks with some of the major players in this area.
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Comments
Think you are paying too much for your mobile phone? Try Bill … | Mobile Phone Monitor
June 30th, 2009
[...] Here is the original post: Think you are paying too much for your mobile phone? Try Bill … [...]
anatinge
July 2nd, 2009
Too bad that billmonitor propose this analys only for O2, Orange and Vodafone. Are you planing to expand this list with some Eastern European operators?
Guillaume Foutry
July 2nd, 2009
No Bill Monitor plans to extend to different areas in the UK, but in the future who knows?