2020 Dec
This paper explains Smart Bilaterals and their importance in streamlining billing and settlement between service providers buying from, and selling to, one another.
This White Paper explains how Information and Communications Technology Service Providers (ICT-SP) or simply ‘Service Providers’ including telecoms companies, MSOs, cloud providers, 5G operators and IoT operators, can achieve immediate major commercial and operational benefits by utilizing Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) within their commercial and operational frameworks.
This document also introduces the term ‘Bilateral’ to describe the combination of Master Services Agreement defining the commercial relationship, the resulting commercial transactions and commercial state between two Service Providers. Furthermore, this document introduces the term ‘Smart Bilaterals’ as those Bilaterals that are implemented using a DLT.
Implementation of Smart Bilaterals, in parallel to existing manual or even automated commercial bilateral arrangements without changing existing ERP and other IT systems, is explained together with benefits for Service Providers and example use cases such as Billing and Settlement.