Best Billing Mediation Software in 2025: Features, Providers & Selection Guide

Best Billing Mediation Software in 2025 would be the one that not only meets the scale and robustness requirements of the business, but is also configurable, flexible and customisable to a degree that makes day to day operations a lot easier, and rolling out new complex features relatively more easy. Let us first understand what billing mediation is in more detail.

Billing Mediation is used in usage-based billing for services that involve consumption of the various services and the charging depends on the quantum of service consumed by the end-customer of the service. It involves processing of usage data records by a mediation engine that resolves the usage data, identifies the service that was the consumer, identifies the account, finds out the usage quantity or duration and calculates the price to be charged to the end-customer.

Billing mediation is used in the Telecom industry, by mobile service providers (MNOs, MVNOs, MVNEs), by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and by Voip service providers. It is also used by IoT based solutions, OTT (Over The Top) service providers, by Cloud offerings or Infrastructure As A Service companies and by Power companies (electricity providers).

Organisations need to carefully examine the features of a billing mediation platform. The key features that stand out as important decision making ones are shown in the diagram and discussed in this section:

Companies need to carefully choose a billing mediation platform that is scalable. The business needs to assess its current and future requirements with respect to the volumes or loads that the mediation platform needs to handle. For example, a regional telco company with a current subscriber base of 100K can estimate if it can double its subscriber base in a 2 years period.

If they can, they need to estimate what would be the CDR (Call Data Records) volume that they need to process through the mediation platform. Typically, for a telco, doubling the subscriber base could lead to growth in the CDR volume by 4 to 5 times. The business needs to be very clear on the kind of growth they expect and accordingly choose a platform that can scale to the required limits and beyond.

There needs to be a bit of head room in processing volumes as many times in the real life production scenarios, the mediation platform will be faced with backlog situations. The backlog could be generated due to issues with the production system itself due to issues like hardware or database issues, or could be issues coming from the carrier side or the source side that generates and provides the CDRs to process.

Horizontal scaling in billing mediation pertains to the ability to process more volumes in the given time frame by adding more computing resources such as more number of processing nodes. If the billing mediation platform has been designed to scale and process higher volumes by simply adding more computing resources, it gives a good deal of flexibility to the business to plan the number of computing resources based on their expected load. A mediation platform that can process data in parallel on multiple servers and has the configurable options to divide the batches onto multiple servers, would naturally be horizontally scalable.

Vertical scaling involves increasing the capacity of the server which is going to process the mediation data. So in vertical scaling, instead of adding more servers, one would upgrade the existing server with more memory and processing power. There are limitations to vertical scaling, that is why horizontal scaling is more important with respect to billing mediation. However, the mediation job should still speed up with vertical scaling as well.

Having a mediation platform that can process faster on need basis by employing additional resources on-the-fly can really boost the confidence in the platform and ensure that the processing of all the Call Data Records is completed well within the daily time limits. The platform that can scale dynamically not only gives the boost in speed of processing when needed, it can also help lower the cloud resourcing costs by using additional resources only when needed.

Typically, the billing mediation system is part of a Telecom Billing platform as this system is extensively used in Telecom domain. It is also used in some other domains that require consumption billing like the Energy sector and Cloud domain as well. Primarily, it is associated with Telecom Billing though and therefore it must be a reliable telecom billing platform. The reliability of the system comes from its robust design, performance and longevity of the service without any major problems.

The term ‘billing mediation for compliance’ signifies the importance that regulatory compliance has, in this domain. Each country has an industrial regulatory authority from the government side, which specifies a set of rules and guidelines that the specific industry must comply with.

In telecom, there is a telecom regulatory authority in each country. Their compliance rules ensure that customers are not charged unfairly and they receive regular communication and notifications from telecom companies on regular intervals regarding their usage, or also based on certain events.

For example, when a consumer uses mobile data, the consumer should receive SMS alerts for the usage of the mobile data at a certain predefined thresholds like usage of the plan at 50%, 80% and 100% etc. Similarly, when the PAYG (Pay As You Go) rates kick in (after exhausting the included quota on the plan), it is mandatory to notify the user about expecting the PAYG rates. This helps avoid any high amount of charges being applied to a user without his or her knowledge. This is also said to avoid a ‘bill shock’ and the associated warning alert is called the ‘bill shock alert’.

The billing mediation platform needs to meet all security requirements, such as a secure environment with authentication, role based access control, providing audit logs and traceability. It needs to protect the PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data from getting into any space which is outside the secured perimeter of the system.

The billing mediation platform should allow deep configuration and be flexible to set up various complex rating and charging scenarios. It should allow complex rate cards, allow duration times increment management and support a comprehensive product catalogue that supports plans and bundles, and various pricing strategies.

The billing mediation system needs to be fault tolerant, meaning any issues or errors that occur in the system are handled gracefully and do not affect the mediation processing of other records. The system should provide error reports to be reviewed by the billing administrator. This allows us to find out missing tariff codes, or configuration errors and even system errors.

While selecting the billing mediation provider, the organisation needs to take into account the various features described in the above section. Let us understand what would be the steps to choose billing mediation provider.

The business needs to make an assessment of its needs, the future prospects and what level of subscriber base it will reach in the next 1 to 3 years. It needs to know from a trial run or a business POC (Proof of Concept) that its business idea is working and they can grow the business in the next 1 to 2 years. This will also give an idea about the volume needs.

Considering the telecom domain, identifying the carriers and the partner tie ups on the network and infrastructure side helps to finalise on the various data sources and CDR file formats. This helps build up specifications for the mediation module that will be required to be supported by the billing mediation provider.

Check out the section What are different CDR Formats? to know more about various CDR formats.

It should be possible to review the billing mediation provider and the platform with a trial and a demo. It is important to insist that the provider furnishes the Performance Testing and Bench-marking data with the business before finalising on the platform.

The write-up discussed the steps to choose billing mediation provider. EarnBill is a trusted billing mediation provider with a comprehensive experience and a mediation platform that is hardened with the above discussed parameters. It is a provider that has varied experience to implement usage billing and CDR processing scenarios. Get in touch with the Best Billing Mediation Software Provider to start a discussion soon.