Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (00:07):
Thank you for joining us here on the Cozy AWS studio at MWC 2025 where we are going to discuss telco transformation. Of course, I am delighted to be joined by Vivek Srivastava, who's head of customer engagement at Circles. Thank you for joining us. We also have Aditya Goyal, CEO Circles Jetpac and Debbie Tsang, who's AWS account Manager. Thank you for joining us. So first of all, let's start with introductions, circles. You're all about empowering the telecom sector to help companies transform to techcos from telcos.

Vivek Srivastava, Circles (00:44):
Yeah, that's right. So I think if you look at where the telco industry is today, right? So there is an increasing amount of commoditization which is kind of happening. The markets are very penetrated in excess of a hundred percent. It's very saturated. You've seen core connectivity services and differences between that becoming less noticeable. You're seeing an evolution of customer needs in terms of both digital and lifestyle. So what that means is that most of the telcos need to kind of adjust the strategies in terms of how do they transform themselves into a digital telco, which is often referred as tecos. And in that process they need to think about how do they get to an agile and a nimble ID infrastructure and a setup. How do you get to a digital customer mindset so that you can engage and delight customers? And lastly but not the least, offering an area of digital services.

(01:49):
So there's a lot of customers who've kind of started to go down that path. We are working with a few of them already by leveraging what we offer in our portfolio towards driving their business outcomes. Most of these business outcomes are around requisition, retention, and monetization. So we offer a platform which is a very comprehensive cloud native, cloud agnostic code, free fully 4G five, G 60, very and also then provide them a lot of digital expertise around that. So we are already working on that and that's really largely telco to TechCo, but there's beyond that, we also have plug and play offerings, which can solve some of their immediate needs around acquisition, monetization, engagement.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (02:38):
Thank you very much for this introduction. Now Aditya, you are also about engaging and delighting customers with your offering circles Jetpac, it's all about travel, convenience, making it easier for travelers. So tell us about your full offering.

Aditya Goyal, Circles Jetpac (02:53):
Absolutely. So Circles is a pioneer in innovation and when I say innovation, we truly live and breathe it, right? And so circles offer the telco, the core telco solutions, which are more plug and play. So let's say you have a telco, you plug and play our solution and voila, you have engagement, monetization and so on and so forth. But at the same time, we also have an incubator with wherein we fundamentally go and develop a telco and that's what I champion. So I lead a business called Jetpac. It's all about making travel convenient for every travel hassle. We have a convenience product and that's what Jetpac is all about. Now the way we have set up Jetpack is we started as a startup in a startup and we build this ground up within circles. And today it's a separate company and I serve as the chief executive officer for that company.

(03:50):
Today we have customers in more than 150 countries all over the world. We are available in 10 different languages, 10 different currencies. And we offer a variety of products like connectivity products, convenience products like lounge accesses, fast tech immigration process. And this whole experiment started really with circles thinking about how do I do internet tech in a tech first basis, like a tech native basis rather than having a separate telco setup. So how it's relevant for telcos is you can actually set up a new business unit which thinks like a TechCo rather than a telco and build it ground up. So that's what I'm currently helping circles with.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (04:34):
Jetpac is all about delivering that seamless experience for travelers.

Aditya Goyal, Circles Jetpac (04:39):
Absolutely.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (04:40):
And Debbie, your role is to assist them and to support Circles and Jetpac in order to be able to deliver that seamless experience?

Debbie Tsang, AWS (04:48):
Yeah, so at AWS we work backwards to understand what are the company goals and mission of our customers. And in circle's case it is to help Telco operate a successful digital brand. And so we work backwards from that goal to build a plan to support circles and building a modern and scalable SaaS solution on AWS to delight million of telco users globally. And in order to do that, we have a huge team of telco industry and SaaS experts supporting us to provide circles with purpose-built technology and solutions in order to scale their business on AWS and to basically enhance customer experience, transform their network and business operations as well as to create new service offerings to the end customers. So if I am to break down into a few key focus areas that we are working on with circles, the first and most fundamental one is to really build a scalable SaaS solutions on AWS, which we have a dedicated partner program called the SaaS Factory, which circles can gain access to our SaaS experts, specialist solution architects, and also technical and business contents and best practices to help them build, run and scale their SaaS business on AWS.

(06:11):
The second area in involve around how we help circles manage cloud financials so that they can remain cost competitive and transfer these cost savings to help their customers innovate. And in this area we actually provide circles with a suite of cloud financial management solutions to basically transform their business to cost transparency, forecasting and optimization and to basically build a more cost conscious culture within circles to help them achieve that decide business outcome. And last but not least, we want to constantly help circles to innovate and to create new service offerings to help enhance and customer experience. And to do that, I think one of the hot topic is around how we can help circles harness the full potential of generative AI and data. And currently we are enabling circles to leverage some of our latest gen AI technology and services.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (07:08):
Vivek. Earlier you alluded to the increasing commoditization of the sector. So tell me how do you intend to address it

Vivek Srivastava, Circles (07:16):
For instance? Yeah, so I think just as I mentioned, you need a very agile and a nimble application and IT infrastructure setup now and then as you kind of get tuned to the customer mindset, you're basically embracing digital. Now the question of innovation is something where we look at a product led kind of an approach. So the incremental bets which telcos will need to take. So the whole idea is how do you get to a faster form of innovation with a sustainable cost structure? And what we do is we provide an approach to telcos where they can look at product-led innovation, which basically means a stronger discovery of the bets, which they're basically going to take. How do you bring rapid experimentation and prototyping into play, more tuned towards a scale fast kind of an approach or a fail forward kind of an approach. So we have built a lot of innovative products around leveraging that approach and essentially it kind of gets down to having an ideation factory within the product development setup.

(08:35):
Use those beds and build products around it and then test it out with certain cohorts in a simplified manner. That's what it means, and you basically then look at a stop it rate scale kind of an approach. So we built many innovative products around that solving particular problems. Some of these problems are around acquisitions. Some of these problems are around engagement, some of these aspects are on monetization. So we look at very clear business outcomes to solve depending on the service provider environment and the market and then come up with some of these approaches. So having an innovation led approach is very fundamental beyond, so it goes beyond embracing digital, but then that leads to a stronger concept of product-led innovation, which many of the bigger companies or global players actually factors.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (09:27):
Aditya your business, of course Jetpac is all about solving problems and addressing pain points for travelers in particular. Could you share some use cases with us and some success stories as well?

Aditya Goyal, Circles Jetpac (09:38):
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, as I said, we don't think like a telco, we think like a TechCo and what are the two most fundamental things for a TechCo user experience and data? So these are the two most fundamental things with which we build any potential solution. So how do I reduce the friction and how do I ensure that I have a very clear database insight with which I can target the customer? Right now specifically, I'll give you an example where we launched lounge accesses on our platform. So any traveler who's traveling and using Jetpac and basically buy a lounge access and they don't have to pay the hefty credit card fees and annual annual memberships, you basically are on an airport, you realize you want to use a lounge, go to Jetpack app, just a couple of clicks and well you are inside.

(10:32):
So we were building this product and then the question was that how do I get users to basically engage with it and then use it for the monetization purposes? So we basically looked at the overall data usage patterns and what we realized was that most of the lounge accesses are actually used when people are towards the end of the journey because they're tired, they want to use the lounge accesses just to freshen up, get comfortable or maybe catch up on some of the emails and what have you. So with that insight, which was a clear database insight, we basically created web hooks. So what's a web hook is that when, let's say you bought a 10 giga product from Jetpack, and let's say when you are at about 50% of the data consumption and about 85% of your data consumption, you will get two SMSs, right?

(11:25):
Which we'll talk about, okay, this is your data usage is whatever, 50% or 80% or 85% and why don't you take some time out and freshen up in a lounge? And then there is a link there which takes you directly to our app on the lounge access page, two more clicks and you've checked out. So that basically led to about 30% increase in engagement and that led to a monetization for the cohort that we were targeting. There was 150% increase in the arpu. So that's a substantial jump in our monetization because this did not go into the regular channels. It basically was a completely separate experience that we designed, which was, as I said, ux, which is friction free, three clicks, and then data, which is led by the insight that this is exactly when people use it. So that's how we designed an end-to-end experience, which led us to both increase in engagement as well as a higher monetization.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (12:24):
They are very impressive statistics I must say. I'm very impressed here. Vivek successes on your part, can you share some of them with us?

Vivek Srivastava, Circles (12:32):
Yeah, yeah I can. So we built a lot of innovative product offerings and I'm particularly very excited to talk about three of them here. So one of them is around embedded connectivity. This is all about providing an ability for users to buy connectivity services on third party community apps. So the idea behind what there was to basically look at a seamless approach towards onboarding and allowing deeper purchase of core connectivity offerings within the third party app itself, we wanted to provide a very simplified approach towards this. So think about you buying a connectivity product from a channel, which you're watching or think about a travel site where you're purchasing a connectivity product. So we built a SDK based approach, a very simple integration approach so that the third party platforms can basically use that and then get access to all these CSP telecom offerings and then provide different bundles and data plans to those users who are engaging on those channels or those apps.

(13:50):
We also provided an approach which is very UI based towards having the ability to customize the journeys so that there is a frictionless experience for the users who are actually buying some of these aspects. Our initial focus has been towards travel and entertainment sectors and we are working with a lot of global major OTT players around this. So these include channels, these include meta, these includes by dance, and we've had a lot of success with the initial services launched on the video channel. So now I can say in Japan, in Aviva, people can actually purchase data plans and data bundles, which are zero rated from avi, a app itself. So it's huge in the sense that people don't have to buy data connectivity services now from the own telco app, they can actually buy it from a third party app. The second part which I wanted to talk about was around something we call is Data os.

(14:53):
This is very focused towards retail tech, if you put it in any simplified language. So if you partnered with retail chains, large retail chains in Japan, Lawson is a very large retail chain. It has about 14,000 stores nationwide. So what we did was we actually changed the whole retail stores to actually become a data supply center of sorts where users can come in into the loss and store locations and get access to free data. And essentially we provide ability for users to come into stores and repurchase free datas 10 times in a month. Now it's a great thing because it allows sort of a digital convenience with real world accessibility. And what that means is for the telcos, it basically means that you're able to provide a great sense of brand awareness nationwide. You're able to fuel customer acquisitions at a much lower subscriber acquisition cost and Lawson gets footfall into their stores and ability for them to get their products consumed.

(16:08):
So we are now started with that. We've had a lot of success and we are now extending that offerings with private label products of loss and bundle with data services so that you can now use your telco points to actually purchase loss and products. The third piece which I want to talk about is something which we call a circles explore, which is essentially our answer to the telcos to basically drive engagement in their app. And the way we are basically doing is that we are essentially providing a lot of third party applications, which are high frequency in nature, which means things like think casual gaming, things like daily horoscope or polls or challenges. And using that engagement data, we can then create hyper segments to target these users with non telco services upsell. So you can think like kids bundle or health bundle or a subscription bundle of sorts. We've had a lot of success with where we did this. So I'll give one instance in Japan where we've now had a 30% engagement growth and we've had a core telco ARPU uplift of 8%. The solution is now also deployed in about five different markets around us. So we are increasingly seeing a strong adoption and one of the reasons is because telcos are facing a lot of cost challenges to actually bring this in and also expertise to bring the third party partnerships in.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (17:47):
Vivek, thank you very much. You've shared some very helpful tips here for me. I'm going to second up a world expert in June and I'll make sure to follow your advice here. And what you showed us really is the great power of partnerships and collaborations to create additional value. That's very important. Now to wrap up this conversation, I'd like to invite you to maybe look forward and tell us what's next in your innovation journey and how maybe AWS will support you in this endeavor.

Aditya Goyal, Circles Jetpac (18:14):
So I think the data and it is very important and that's how we've been engaging with AWS and for a tech core, as we said, UX and data are the most important things and I think the next step for us is really double down on the data part because I think we've done a tremendous job in UX already. Our net promoter scores are above 50 and I think our customers love us. Our retentions are above 50%, which is quite industry leading. So I think we're going to double down on data, and again, I don't want to use the buzzword for the sake of it, but really we're going to double down on this unique position that Jetpack is in, which is basically at the intersection of travel, telco, and tech, right? We are in this unique position at the intersection of it, we are going to harness the data and basically we use going to use the capabilities of artificial intelligence and the machine learnings and the genetic algorithms in order to really enrich that data to basically engage our customers and to be able to monetize that further for us. Really the focus is going to double down on the data and learn and understand more and more about our consumer behaviors to be able to engage them better, to be able to monetize our business better. And yeah, that's the future and we were developing an AI engine on that and that's going to be taking us into the future

Vivek Srivastava, Circles (19:38):
On the next steps for some of the innovative offerings we just spoke about. See if you look at embedded connectivity, we are going to extend that to meta and by dance, what that means is that we will have ability to tap in inbound Romes and target them with data plans and data bundles. On the retail tech side. We are going to go down the private label offerings from Lawson and bundle more exclusive and tailored offerings now for the customers who are actually coming into Lawson stores. So we really want to look at it as the convenience store of the future, and that's the way we are kind of imagining and building onto it. On the other aspects related to innovation journey, we are kind of thinking in a direction where how do we get into different business models for all the channel and partner ecosystem, which we are setting up.

(20:31):
So there are two or three elements which we are working on. One is a wholesale model, which is essentially providing a light edge connectivity vertical for some of these app companies. So think like Uber, how do we make Uber get to a telco vertical on a light touch basis so that they can actually start selling telco subscriptions on their app. You can think about exclusive team packs of sorts where you could actually bundle exclusive merchandise with data bundles and that's the other area we can extend ourselves into. And the third part is really about loyalty as a service where we can start looking at leveraging the bonus points or the data points which the telco users have and have more partner benefits associated with it.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (21:16):
Well, it sounds like the world is your oyster already, Debbie, to wrap up to conclude with, how would you support them in this innovation journey?

Debbie Tsang, AWS (21:24):
Yeah, we are very excited to be with circles on this journey. So I think from our side, we'll continue to leverage our industry experts and SaaS experts. We have many purpose built solutions and telco specific use cases that will help circles leverage data. I think the key thing is to really leverage data to understand, to engage and to enhance their customer experience and to co-innovate together to see how we can transform digital and telco experience for global users around the world.

Charlotte Kan, TelecomTV (21:57):
Well, many thanks to all of you. Great conversation here on how to engage and delight customers with innovation and by solving their problems. Of course. Thank you.