Page 32 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Consumer Experience and Protection

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

There are even more issues remaining currently open, which will need further discussions:

• Mobile operators have increasing problems with the huge amount of data traffic in their networks.
Therefore, if high speed fixed networks are available, there is a massive trend to use so-called WIFI
offloading, where data traffic is redirected via WIFI accesses to the internet backbone core. The
consequences for DFS seem to be quite unexplored, by now.
• The text displayed in the course of DFS interactions or the accentuation in spoken dialogue systems
may be loaded with emotions, which could affect the users' experience of the service (QoE). Emotion
detectors could be used to minimize any negative impact from this text and speech material. Currently,
Requirements for emotion detectors in telecommunications are under study in an ETSI project (STF#504),
which will provide a new Technical Specification (ETSI TS 103 296).

• A serious problem (mostly for regulators) are effects which cannot easily be allocated to one of the
stakeholders in the DFS process. A prominent example are so-called early timeouts in the DFS, which
anyone outside the DFS provider would interpret as dropped-calls, i.e. blame the network or blame the
terminal or blame the user - in reality it turns out just to be a badly designed flow-of-actions: users still
reading instructions on their screens before initiating the next step of a transaction are hit by an invisible
timer’s timeout action.
Because the field of DFS and its related QoS and QoE aspects is both of high importance and quite complex,
capacity building is essential. Therefore, it is suggested that the ITU start the development of online e-learning
courses in this area.

4 Guidance and suggestions

4.1 Use case #1

In this situation, where it is assumed that the end-user has phone with limited capabilities and uses that phone
directly for DFS, it is important to make the use of USSD mandatory whenever possible at least for the initial
part of the transaction.
Following-up communication with DFS user, like balance statements etc. may be done via SMS, but encryption
should also be imposed as well as other mandatory features of SMS, like delivery attempts until confirmation.

• KPIs for USSD are under study.
• KPIs for SMS that should be monitored are the following:
• SMS service non-accessibility [%]

• SMS completion failure ratio [%]
• SMS end-to-end delivery time [s]
• SMS receive confirmation failure ratio [%]

4.2 Use case #2

In this situation, where it is assumed that either end-users or agents have access to smartphones it is suggested
to mandate the use of HTTPS as the only protocol to be used for DFS.

KPIs for HTTPS are not easy to monitor, due to the use of the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol:

• HTTPS Service non accessibility [%]
• HTTPS set-up time [s]

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