Riyadh-based Al Rajhi Bank has managed to cut its cost per message by 22% – and the bank sends three billion SMSs a year.
The cost is so high, said Cequens, because 12% of all numbers are ported. This results in cross-net termination costs that are almost four times those for on-net termination.
Al Rajhi has SMS termination agreements with all operators in Saudi Arabia and can theoretically eliminate those charges, the bank pays tremendous costs as messages are routed based on their prefix and not the actual operator.
Cequens said that TrueNorth is a smart routing platform, deployed on-premise, that communicates with messaging gateways. “It has been primarily built to reduce unnecessary costs specifically related to ported numbers,” said the company.
Cequens is now working with Al Rajhi Bank to replace the current SMS gateway with the Cequens integration platform, as part of the second phase of its agreement.
