Operators have spent a decade competing on price and network. The one monthly interaction with every customer has barely changed. That is starting to look like a missed opportunity.
Ask a European telecoms operator where its next point of margin will come from and the answer is rarely the payment. It is spectrum, convergence, a content bundle, or a discount brand brought in-house to cover the value end of the market. KPN's 2024 acquisition of Youfone in the Netherlands was a clean illustration of the logic: if price is what moves customers, it is better to own a low-cost option than to cede that ground to someone else.
The pressure behind that logic is real. Across Europe, price consistently tops the reasons people give for changing provider. Switching rates vary a lot by market, and the Netherlands sits on the slower end, but the competitive pressure is the same everywhere: European incumbents have spent recent years defending their bases, losing legacy fixed and TV lines and watching broadband numbers come under pressure even as they invest heavily in their networks. The contest is largely accepted to be fought on two fronts, headline price and network quality, with bundling and convergence layered on top to make leaving less attractive. Retention is treated mostly as a matter of not losing on any of them.
The trouble with both fronts is how little room they leave. Price is the lever an operator controls least. Everyone is buying from the same wholesale cost base, so any advantage is thin and short-lived, and regulators keep working to make leaving easier rather than harder. Network quality is expensive to move and, past a certain point, invisible to the customer. That leaves a question operators ask less often than they should: of the things that shape whether a customer stays, which do they actually control? One of them is easy to overlook. It is the payment.
Customer experience
For a recurring-revenue business, the payment is the single interaction that happens with every customer, every month, without fail. It is also the one that tends to get the least design attention. The invoice goes out, the money comes in, or it does not, and in between sits a touchpoint that is easy to treat as a back-office process rather than a customer experience. That matters more than it looks, because the payment moment is where a surprising amount of churn is actually set in motion. A charge that is higher than last month with no explanation. A failed direct debit the customer never notices until a reminder arrives. A bill that takes thirty seconds too long to understand. None of these show up in a churn model as "payment experience". They show up as a customer who was already comparing offers and found one more reason to go.
In the Netherlands this is about to get more complex, not less. iDEAL, the method behind most Dutch online payments, is being folded into the pan-European wallet Wero, with the migration under way through 2026. EPI, the body behind Wero, has not published a date for recurring or subscription support, and it is not expected to be in place before 2027 at the earliest. iDEAL was built for one-off transfers, so recurring telecoms billing still rests, as it has, on SEPA Direct Debit (automatische incasso). That rail works, but it carries its own friction: mandates to manage, refunds a customer can claim within 8 weeks without giving a reason, and recall and fraud costs that ultimately land on the biller. As the underlying methods shift, operators that have treated payment as an afterthought will feel the seams; those that have treated it as part of the customer experience will not.
Treat it as communication, and the same touchpoint starts working for retention
This is the part operators tend to underestimate. The industry increasingly accepts that ease of doing business, how little effort it takes a customer to resolve a problem, now drives loyalty as much as price or coverage, and billing questions sit among the frictions customers resent most. Yet the payment that produces those questions is rarely treated as part of that experience. Treat the payment purely as collection and it generates friction: confused customers, support spikes around billing dates, reminders sent to people who already paid. Treat it as communication, and the same touchpoint starts working for retention instead of against it. The numbers bear this out. The Swedish mobile operator Vimla saw customer service cases fall by more than 40% in the first six months after moving to a redesigned payment platform. Another Swedish operator, Hallon, cut its debt collection cases by 80%, and across telecom and broadband providers taking the same approach, on-time payments have risen by around 20%. Fewer tickets and fewer late payments are cost savings. But a customer who understands their charge and is never chased for money they already paid is also a customer with one less reason to leave.
There is a structural reason this gets missed. Most payment infrastructure is built around the transaction as the unit of value, optimised to get a single payment through. Recurring revenue does not work that way. Its value is the relationship continuing, cycle after cycle, and that calls for infrastructure organised around the customer rather than the charge. Billogram, which operates payment-lifecycle infrastructure for recurring-revenue businesses across Europe and earns when customers pay on time rather than from the friction when they do not, has built its case on exactly that distinction. The wider point stands regardless of vendor: in a market where price is contested and the network is settled, the payment is one of the few levers an operator still fully owns.
It is worth getting right now, while switching is still slow enough to make the experience matter, rather than after the next rail change makes the gaps impossible to ignore.
