Working Groups

Our new Google Ads Placement and Creation Working Group has been created in partnership with MCP Insight, and is tasked with improving ad clarity, reducing consumer confusion, and optimising campaigns through industry collaboration.

The purpose of the working group is to help improve the merchant/customer experience when using Google Ads to promote services, as well as review the creation and placement of Google ads to assist with successful ad campaigns.

The objectives of our new Working Group are:

• Providing greater clarity to Industry on the optimal method to create Google Ads

• Reducing harm caused by ads that inadvertently can mislead consumers and lead to unnecessary merchant spend

• Share data, trends, experience and advice with the aim of educating the value chain – and the regulator – as to the potential issues in this area

We believe that Industry should work together to develop best practices to reduce consumer harm, mitigate against the risk of regulatory scrutiny, and optimise their Google Ads campaigns to deliver a more positive customer experience.

The working group is being formed to explore these issues and, where possible, agree best practice to mitigate the risk of consumer complaints and regulatory scrutiny. The working group will also look at another issue affecting consumers and advertisers. Google RDAs use optimised targeting to place ads on high-conversion websites and apps. However, some unscrupulous publishers exploit the algorithm by building websites specifically designed.

aimm and MCP Insight believe that by developing and adopting best practice it would reduce the conversion rates of unscrupulous publisher sites, thereby reducing complaints and protecting advertising spend.

 

We are launching this new working group to look at other payment mechanics, for instance, PayPal, and looking at some of the issues that arise when employing this as a payment method, as well as learning more about other methods available.

The purpose of this working group is not to move away from our core strategic purpose of driving commercial growth in phone paid services, but instead is trying to assist members already utilising other methods by bringing them together to problem solve, share experiences with complementary digital payment mechanics, their use cases and revenue uplift possibilities as well as seeing what potential opportunities there are to introduce phone paid services to new audiences.

To assist members in improving their regulatory outcomes by providing guidance, advice and ongoing analysis of regulatory decision making; and inform AIMM responses to consultations.

aimm are mindful that the UK Industry is perceived as challenging due to its regulatory landscape.

In order to provide assurance to the value chain and those looking to enter the UK market, aimm will provide a forum for regulatory assessment, discussion and healthy questioning of outcomes. This will provide clarity to those members or potential new businesses and enable them to maximise their understanding of regulatory compliance and as such their outcomes.

Mission of the Group:

• Understand the impact that fraud has on the value chain
• Examine options to reduce existing risks, or mitigate risks managed through regulation by implementing appropriate anti-fraud measures
• The Group will benefit from open discussion and sharing of non commercial knowledge in order to reach conclusions that benefit all parties and reduce consumer risk.

To assist the Board in facilitating exploring the opportunities of e-money and removing the digital payments barrier.

To collaboratively agree commercially attractive target markets and the approach required from aimm and industry to ensure maximum exploitation of micropayments in these areas of commercial growth.

Whilst regulatory simplification is crucial to growing this area, aimm wants this working group to also focus on short and longer term emerging markets and new uses for Direct Carrier Billing.

In our effort to ensure that we address the industry issues that surround the lack of consumer understanding of micropayments services, our new working group has been formed. In parallel the group will encourage the standardisation of great working practices within the member base, to allow our external communications to focus on promoting the excellent results being achieved in an environment that protects the consumer.

The group will focus on remedying the lack of education for the public on their interactions with payment mechanics, by providing accessible information which will reduce the damage done to the industries reputation by negative or false PR. It will also look to standardise customer care processes across the membership and offer support and knowledge to all customer care operatives with templated information and industry agreed practices for provision to their customers.

TERMS OF REFERENCE: Internal Standardisation and External Education

MISSION

To assist the Board in fulfilling its ambitions in relation to the standardisation of excellent practice throughout both the member base and external businesses, producing white papers detailing agreed transparent process to facilitate growth and reduce harm.

To address a lack of consumer knowledge in the area of micropayments, educating the public with reliable, accessible information suitable for publication across a number of sources, including regulators, mobile network operators and trade association statements and news stories.

MEMBERSHIP

Open to all Silver and Gold members

SCOPE

aimm are mindful that the Payforit brand/DCB and historically PRS has been damaged by both bad practice within the industry and false PR/comms from consumers and uneducated operator customer service teams. There is a need to raise the profile of positive news stories in this area, alongside a requirement to re-educate consumers who may have inaccurate views of payment mechanics, and to arm customer care operatives within the networks with correct information for them to relay to their callers.

Initial priorities in this group are listed as being:

• Pricing transparency – compiling best practice for flows
• Sharing successful Customer Service practices
• Addressing MNO and MVMO customer service education – reducing emotive language, inflammatory wording, disputing inaccuracies
• Producing MNO and MVNO website information informing customers accurately about payment mechanics
• Best possible outcomes for billing information
• PayforitSucks –engage and understand/educate?
• Good news PR and comms (ie HTTPS security audits, new uses and users of PFI)
• False statement rebuttal –pre-agreed statements from aimm/PSA

METHOD

aimm’s working groups run as required throughout the year (group dependant) and are constituted from aimm members, guests who may add to the meeting content, external speakers and observers.

Our new group will be looking at how the MNO’s and L1’s can work together to improve the current systems on services that require the secure passing of information. This is referring to the Copper Horse audits which look to increase security (around users personal details) between aggregators and MNOs. This working group has been set up to identify and resolve the barriers to the completion of the security project, identify common issues, goals and discuss best practice opportunities and utilise resources available to realise those goals and reduce consumer risk.

TERMS OF REFERENCE: Security Project

MISSION

The security project group is a short-medium term project seeking to identify common issues and resolutions in this area by open discussion and sharing of non-commercial knowledge in order to reach conclusions that benefit all parties and reduce consumer risk.

MEMBERSHIP

Open to all Silver and Gold MNOs and Level 1 providers only

SCOPE

The Working Group objective is to identify and resolve the barriers to completion of the security project, identify common issues, goals and best practice opportunities and utilise resources available to realise those goals.

This group will commence with a call for inputs around the issues followed by a meeting/s as required to seek to overcome that which has been identified.

METHOD

aimm’s working groups run as required throughout the year (group dependant) and are constituted from aimm members, guests who may add to the meeting content, external speakers and observers.

 

An opportunity for the UK broadcasters to get together and discuss current industry issues, and future looking business opportunities.

The consumer journey working group was founded to examine and resolve the issues experienced by consumers when they see a charge to their mobile or domestic phone bill from a third party and wish to understand and / or discuss this charge with the company that charged them.

The group first met in 2015 where it examined issues such as call handling by MNOs, referral to the regulator PSA. PSA’s own call handling and busting myths that dominate internet forums.

This topic is relevant to all aimm supported  members, and is top of  the agenda to ensure that post sale consumer journey is professional and efficient.

 

This Working Group was created from proposal at the GM, and has only met once in November 2015 to discuss concerns regarding the sharing of data for benchmarking. Discussion on how to consolidate data and the categorisation of consumer calls. Agreed that needed data to enable understanding on future issues with the data acting as an indicator to where the market is moving away from established patterns or “benchmarks”.

THIS WORKING GROUP IS NOW CLOSED – FOR SIMILAR WORKING GROUP PLEASE SEE OUR CHARITY WORKING GROUP

The activities of the Charity Text Action Group are focused primarily around resolving any issues with charity text via short code ranges, growing society lottery services, examining charity call centre activities and assisting technology and fundraising companies.

Under discussions are a range of topics such as the use of unique 72 shortcode range for society lotteries to maximise VAT exemption, aimm’s work with EU on donation value thresholds and changing the regulatory requirements for regular giving by text.

CTAG comprises of society lottery managers, donation enabling companies, campaign management companies and aggregators/intermediaries.

Although this group has a different remit to the Broadcast Charity Working Group, there may be mutual benefits from the output of each.

Group is focusing on:

• Gambling Commission requirements
• Driving Society Lottery success
• Improvements in technology for donation and lottery systems 

The Charity Working Group is formed for large scale charities who work with broadcasters for their fundraising campaigns and the intermediaries that they work with.

The Working Group’s objective is to bring all parties together to establish common practices, to work together and to address common issues. By working together with major UK charities, mobile network operators and broadcasters, this allows us to lobby regulators and Governmental officials to solve issues that affect our industry.

We ensure that charities are assisted with audibility for the claiming of Gift Aid, the rules around post donation marketing and a donor’s journey.

The groups focus is:

• Improvements to Gift Aid system
• Charity campaign successes and case studies
• Society Lotteries launch and promotion
• Donation rates and improvements to donation channels
• Regulatory updates and impacts

The aimm quarterly General Meetings (GM’s) are open to aimm Members and are a good opportunity to find out what aimm has been working on over the prior three months, latest industry news and updates and a chance to listen to speakers from other areas across the industry.

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) is the last meeting of the year and is open to all aimm members.

You can find presentations from both aimm and our speakers below for your reference.

The Industry Liaison Panel (ILP) is an advisory panel run by the premium rate regulator Phone-paid Services Authority which seeks to identify emerging trends and issues and facilitate a two-way communication between industry and Phone-paid Services Authority.

aimm represents its members and general industry at the quarterly ILP meetings. Members are able to raise items through aimm to add to the ILP agenda.

PSA produces meeting notes after each meeting which are available to members below. You can also find the entire set of meeting notes from PSA’s website: https://psauthority.org.uk/about-us/ilp/ilp-summary-notes

THIS WORKING GROUP IS NOW CLOSED.

The Digital Marketing Working Group (DMWG) is the specialist working group of L2 providers set up to look at the issues that are experienced by members using digital marketing aimed at UK mobile consumers.

Issues range from affiliate driven malware, affiliate fraud, misleading practices targeted at the advertising funds and placement advertising inappropriately reaching children through Apps and YouTube.

Three areas under the Working Groups focus are:

Affiliate marketing issues: (including malware, adware, misleading promotions etc.), how these manifest, how to control risk, how to apply controls, how to put pressure on affiliate networks to exercise controls, detecting of issues and collaborative notification of issues.

Regulatory approach: regulatory approach towards advertisers using digital marketing, proportionate and pragmatic treatment and the advertisers evidence demonstrating that controls are in place.

Children access to services via advertising not aimed at children but where the content may be attractive to children (such as games).

Subscription sign-up. Consumer complaints indicate that consumers appear to be unaware that they were committing to a subscription service and once committed did not use the tools available to cancek the subscription.

Building trust and confidence with consumers is key to running successful interactive broadcast services. The AIME Interactive Broadcast forum was established in November 2007 to address pricing transparency for consumers and continues to meet on a regular basis with the objective of driving growth in the interactive broadcast market in a responsible manner.

Recent key projects have included business case authoring for Voice Short Code use in broadcast, as well as a number of research reports and best practice guides including the comprehensive AIME Participation TV Guide.

Recent activity in 2014 has been the formation of the sub-group, the AIME Charity Working Group and the development of changes to the on screen and radio call-to-action that will become effective in mid-2015

THIS WORKING GROUP IS NOW CLOSED

The aimm Charge to Mobile Working Group is a  well attended and active working group; originally formed as the Payforit Working Group in 2010, it extended its remit after 2014 to encompass the growth and development of the whole category of “Charge to Mobile”.

The Charge to Mobile Working Group continues to be a consulting partner to the Payforit Management Group providing feedback on development of the cross operator payment scheme as part of its activities.The Working Group participants are made up from mobile operators and connected payment intermediaries / aggregators with occasional presence from key merchants. The Working Group objective is to identify and resolve the barriers to growth, collaborate on areas that can provide growth through new products for consumers, identify common goals and opportunities and utilise resources available to realise those goals.

The Charge to Mobile Working Group focuses widely on the overall charge to mobile billing capabilities including voice shortcodes, text shortcodes and direct operator billing, assessing market opportunities and collaborating with members involved in the group to remove barriers to market growth and resolving identified consumer issues.

The Voice Services group, since its creation in 2010, has tackled a number of issues that relate more closely to the traditional fixed line environment. This group continues to drive initiatives such as Higher Rate Tariffs and VAT free PRS services, whilst focussing also on projects such as clearer pricing transparency, supporting regulatory frameworks and contributing to regulatory consultation responses.