Page 26 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Consumer Experience and Protection

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Consumer Experience and Protection

2 Problem statements

2.1 Different use cases

QoS aspects of DFS need to be assessed for two different use cases:

1) In use case #1 the targeted group of users of such service is limited to the use of (cheap) basic feature
phones. This excludes for example browser-based DFS solutions.
2) In use case #2 the additional QoS aspects are assessed when the minimum requirements to the phones
used for DFS are raised and basic smartphone functionality can be assumed.

2.2 Legal entities

Today, one can observe that the provision of a service offer (“service”) is – as a general rule – independent
from the physical operation of a telecommunication network.
Whereas for most service offers there is – beside the general legal framework – no specific regulation,
DFS “services” are under the close control of the regulators of the banking sectors, whereas operators of
telecommunication networks are under the control of the regulators of the telecom sectors.

Therefore, legal aspects (from a QoS perspective) need to assess two different legal cases:

a) In legal case #a: the provider of a DFS “service” and the operator of a physical telecommunication network
are two distinct and different legal entities.

b) In legal case #b: the provider of a DFS “service” and the operator of a physical telecommunication network
are the same and identical legal entity.

2.3 Mobile Network QoS affecting all services

The figure 2 (adapted from Recommendation ITU-T E.804 and ETSI TS 102 250) shows a model for quality of
service parameters. This model has four layers.

The first layer is the Network Availability, which defines QoS rather from the viewpoint of the service provider
than the service user. The second layer is the Network Access. From the service user's point of view this is the
basic requirement for all the other QoS aspects and parameters. The third layer contains the other three QoS
aspects Service Access, Service Integrity and Service Retainability. The different services are located in the
fourth layer; the performance of these services is characterized by service specific QoS KPIs.

The first three layers (highlighted with green boxes) are common to ALL mobile services or applications.

They are characterized typically by the following parameters (KPIs):

• network availability
• network accessibility
• service accessibility

• service integrity
• service retainability
In cases where the KPIs in layers 1, 2 and 3 are not maintained at a stable high level it is useless to make
attempts to assess the QoS of any kind of services because the statistical relevance of QoS figures received
will be close to zero.

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