BillMonitor

While T-Mobile customers across the UK have been left outraged at the news that their own network has breached every kind of privacy law by selling their personal data, non T-mobile customers are equally incensed that their own networks are actually creating the market by purchasing the data!

As our friend Flora at CNET comments, if you get a cold call from another network offering you a deal when your contract is about to run out, not only is it unsolicited and potentially rather annoying but they could have actually paid to steal your data in the first place!
One of our stellar software developers on a T-Mobile tariff was caught up in this fracas and recently pelted by all manner of calls from out of the blue. Little did we know that was only the tip of the iceberg!
Luckily using a comparison service like ours, which actually tracks your usage month by month and reminds you when your contract is about to expire, or another price comparison calculator, allows you to take your mobile matters into your own hands and find the best deal for you without the “help” of those data cowboys.

And as we’ve said from the beginning in our privacy policy: “We do not and will not sell or rent your personal information to anyone, for any reason, at any time.”

BillMonitor announces accreditation by Ofcom

BillMonitor is the first mobile price comparison service to be accredited by Ofcom

Oxford, UK, 21^st May 2009 – BillMonitor, a new price comparison tool for UK mobile users, today becomes the first UK mobile price comparison service to be accredited by Ofcom. The site uses advanced statistics developed by BillMonitor’s team of mathematicians with scientific advisors from Oxford University to identify the best price plan for consumers based on their individual usage patterns. According to research from BillMonitor, 88% of users can save an average of 39% on their mobile phone bill.

The UK mobile market offers consumers more than three million deals on over 119,078 tariffs. With such a broad choice and the complexity of offers available, the need for impartial, personalised mobile advice is stronger than ever.

BillMonitor’s Interim Mobile Price Index analysed hundreds of actual users’ online bills, illustrating that most consumers are on the wrong plan for their usage patterns. For example, 82% are on plans with inclusive minutes they don’t use. BillMonitor simplifies the complicated mobile market to empower customers by clearly showing them how and where they could make savings:

• 88% of BillMonitor users save money by switching to the tariff most suitable for them – an average saving of £16.46 a month – that equates to £197 a year
• Extrapolating across the 26 million UK mobile contract users, that equates to £4.09 billion of savings
• Most users could upgrade to an iPhone for just £2.70 more per month than they are already paying for their current contract handset

BillMonitor’s service includes:

• Online bill tracking: Consumers supply their online billing account details and BillMonitor automatically analyses their online bills for a tailored and accurate recommendation based on analysis of their usage patterns
• One-off tariff search: Users can enter the number of minutes and texts they use per month, as well as overseas calls, picture messaging and data usage to locate the most appropriate tariff for consumers’ usage patterns

“Science has been put to work for struggling consumers in a free service to help them lower their bills,” said Stelios Koundouros, Co-founder, BillMonitor. “BillMonitor helps people to save money on their mobile phone bills by providing them with accurate information to empower them to make confident purchase decisions.”

Established by a team of mathematicians and scientific advisors, Prof Chris Holmes and Dr Nicolai Meinshausen, from the University of Oxford, BillMonitor provides a very practical application of complex statistics; championing the desire of consumers to save money, especially important in uncertain economic times.  The service analyses historical usage patterns, predicts future behaviour and suggests the best mobile price plans with a high degree of certainty that individuals will see real savings. The science behind the service is based on research funded by an R&D grant from the Department of Trade and Industry in statistical decision technology.

For more information on BillMonitor, please see: www.billmonitor.com

- Ends-

Approved by OFCOM

About BillMonitor

BillMonitor was founded by Dr. Stelios Koundouros, Professor Chris Holmes and Dr. Nicolai Meinshausen based on research funded by an R&D grant from the Department of Trade and Industry in statistical decision technology.  BillMonitor.com is operated by Optimor Ltd, a company registered in England with offices at 10 Mayfield Road, Oxford, OX2 7EL. Optimor is backed by The Accelerator Group and Finance South East.

For more information please contact:

Georgina Bonner / Alexis Dalrymple

Billmonitor@hotwirepr.com

Tel: 020 7608 2500 / +44 (0) 7739 333 288

While monitoring the millions of ever-changing mobile deals available, here at BillMonitor we get a pretty good idea of the scope of the UK mobile market, so naturally we’re interested in this.

OFCOM (the independent regulator for mobile in the UK) is trying to make sense of it all in its upcoming ‘Mobile Sector Assessment’. Their aim is to see what can be done to make mobile better for all of us – consumer confidence in mobile is lower than all other services considered in a report conducted for the government last June. In preparation OFCOM released a consultation report with a series of questions that have been investigated over the last year. In the consultation they highlighted some key issues:

Tariff confusion:
According to OFCOM only 15% of consumers find it ‘very easy’ to choose a contract. This isn’t surprising to BillMonitor: maintaining our comprehensive tariff and bundle information is serious work – tariff information is unstandardised, with bundle information scattered across many network’s webpages, and with much of the details only in small print terms and conditions. We think that having a choice between over 100,000 tariffs is a good thing – it means there is a tariff out there that is great for you – but an unclear choice is no choice.

These factors can lead to consumers being on a more expensive contract than is right for them. We see the effects of these problems in our results, as almost every one who uses our bill assessment could be on a significantly better tariff. In fact, we’ve been busy number-crunching to find out exactly how much people should be saving – the results will be in our interim mobile price index report, some of which makes for some eye-watering reading.

Billing and cost clarity:
Both the OFCOM consultation and a recent report by Consumer Focus talk of the hidden costs in billing. Often operators charge for itemised paper bills, even though without itemised billing it is impossible to see where your money is being spent. Different networks bill the same types of calls in inconsistent ways such as (depending on the network) rounding up calls, deferring charges and excluding voicemail from your inclusive allowances. BillMonitor takes these kind of things into account when working out the best tariff – but we often have to phone up the networks to find out exactly how much a certain type of call will cost. Compounding this is the fact the each network presents their bill differently and with varying levels of detail.

Ease of switching:
The current economic situation is making many mobile users think about switching. A recent survey by Booz & Company found that 43% are considering changing to a cheaper contract. Switching mobile network while keeping your number should be easy – you just get a PAC code from your old network and give it to your new one. It’s never quite that simple though; one of the BillMonitor team recently spent 45 minutes being bounced around a call centre, finally being put on silent hold for 10 minutes before he finally managed to get a PAC! Even though most BillMonitor users still save when they switch to a better tariff with their current network, consumers should be allowed to move to a good deal on a different network without this hassle.

Problems like these are exactly the reason why we created BillMonitor and we’re looking forward to see what OFCOM has to say.

Today we managed to hit a major milestone in our efforts to improve our mobile bill tracking feature. Thanks to Ben’s efforts the engine is now so fast that once the crawlers have successfully retrieved a bill we can process it in real-time on the site.

So, what does this mean?

Real mobile bills are now treated in exactly the same way as the statistically generated bills we use for our tariff calculator. You can now filter by handset, contract length, and operator as much as you like – the engine will always return a recommendation based on our very latest plans.

Unfortunately the drawback to this is that all our old stored recommendations are no longer available. If you have submitted a recommendation recently you will have to resubmit it. Your new recommendation will be valid forever, and will automatically update as we get new plans. That means that if you bookmark it you can come back at any time to see if there are any new deals that would work better for your usage.

Phew.

Until now our system hasn’t compared SIM only plans. They’ve been on our to-do list for a while because they’re competitive and exciting, but we wanted to make sure that the plans we supported were up to scratch before we added more. Yesterday, I decided that now was the time to expand our horizons, so I began the task of adding 9,000 plan and bundle combinations to our already 38,000-strong database.

We’ve always expected our plan space to grow as the industry expands, so we’ve written the whole system with that in mind. I managed to throw in SIM only plans from 5 operators in just one morning, including grabbing a coffee or three, checking my newsreader, and double- and triple-checking all the rates to make sure that they’re perfect for our customers. They were up on our staging box by lunchtime, and that’s where they’ll stay until we’ve tested them both by hand and using mind-expanding statistics to ensure that they’re perfect.

The new plans aren’t available on the alpha yet, but if you’d like to know when they are and have a chance to test the future of mobile tariff price comparison, drop me a line at mac@optimorlabs.com and I’ll hook it up for you.