On Thursday June 13th 9AM KL / Wednesday June 12th 9PM ET we ran a webinar with Richard Im, Global Director of Partnerships at Apigate. The purpose of the webinar is to present their TADSummit Asia keynote: Apigate Journey from In-house Initiative to Global Powerhouse. The video is shown above, and the slides below.

I’ve known Richard for many years; followed and helped the Apigate story since the beginning. Here is a WSO2.Telco presentation from TADSummit 2015.  A change you’ll see is a focus on solving specific end customer problems with Apigate’s offer, moving beyond enablement; Apigate is so much more than APIs.

Richard kicked off with a quick review of Apigate’s history, as even though the name is relatively new, the business and people have a decade long history of helping telcos on service innovation.

Today ApigateAXP provides a common integration layer across carriers that removes the fragmentation that has stifled service innovation. Think of it as a telco-focused Google Play / App Store; with services packaged up to meet the needs of end-customers in APAC and beyond, where telco involvement delivers a better experience.  Apigate’s shift from WSO2.Telco is a focus on specific propositions to different end-customer segments, rather than enablement. We see this shift across many CPaaS providers, for example with Twilio’s shift into enterprise services, and VoIP Innovations Showroom.

Apigate AnyPay solves the failure points that have limited direct carrier billing (DCB), which resulted in some markets and segments with 1% conversation rates. AnyPay has focused on the end-customer experience, not just enablement, to solve problems faced by people in their everyday lives. For example, we discussed payments for utility bills back home, not just wallet transfers, for migrant workers. In my discussions with carriers over the past couple of months in both Africa and the Middle East, its been great to see Apigate’s name mentioned with respect to the end-customer problems they are solving; as that’s the key to new revenues.