Is your business paying a complexity tax?

Is your business paying a complexity tax?
Probably. So now is the time to start unpicking the Frankenstack.

Our team has just landed  back from the annual pilgrimage to the land of canals, cyclists and smoke filled coffee shops with the clear view this year’s MVNOs World 2026 had a new and distinct centre of gravity.

There was less of the familiar themes of wholesale access, price pressure, digital transformation and distribution. Those conversations were had, but they no longer feel like the dominant ones over dinner.

AI integration is now table stakes too, the more interesting discussion sat around intelligence, ecosystems and the ability to create value around connectivity rather than simply sell access to it.

AI has moved from the innovation slide to a basis of the operating model.

Customer experience has moved from a service function to a growth strategy. MVNOs are looking beyond reactive engagement, where the customer only hears from the brand when something fails, a bill arrives or a retention offer is triggered too late. The better operators are thinking about timely, relevant interactions across the full customer lifecycle.

That shift is significant because it raises the bar for everyone.

A telco that wants to operate in this next phase needs more than a competitive plan table and a clean checkout journey. It needs the ability to understand customers, act on data, personalise experiences, support partnerships and move quickly when the market changes. It needs to behave less like a traditional utility and more like a modern digital service.

That ambition runs straight into the oldest problem in telecom.

The stack.

Underneath many telecom businesses sits a dense layer of inherited complexity that quietly decides what can and cannot happen. From the outside, the experience may look simple enough: a plan page, an app, an eSIM journey, a bill, a support channel. Behind that can sit separate billing platforms, CRM tools, provisioning systems, rating engines, network inventory databases, payment gateways, reporting layers and manual processes that have been patched together over years.

Every industry has technical debt. Telco has made an art form of living with it.

This is the Complexity Tax. It does not arrive as a single invoice and it rarely appears in a board pack under its own name. It shows up in delayed product launches, bloated integration costs, order fallout, manual reconciliation, poor data visibility, customer care load and the slow creep of operational workarounds that become permanent because nobody wants to disturb the system underneath.

That tax compounds over time.

The split between business support systems and operational support systems is a good place to start. Billing, CRM, provisioning, product catalogues, usage rating, customer care and network activation often sit across different systems with different histories and different rules. That may be workable when products are stable and change is slow. It becomes a real constraint when an MVNO wants to launch a lifestyle bundle, test a new partner offer, create a personalised upgrade path or build a digital-first sub-brand with eSIM activation at its core.

A simple idea can quickly become a multi-system exercise. A loyalty bundle needs billing logic. A promotional offer needs rating rules. An app-led upgrade needs clean eligibility data. A partner proposition needs APIs that behave consistently. An eSIM order needs provisioning to work the first time.

When a dependency breaks, the customer does not care which system caused the issue. They only know the plan failed, the discount disappeared, the bill looks wrong or the app cannot explain what happened.

Legacy billing and rating engines create another layer of friction. Many were built for an older world of voice minutes, SMS events and static data buckets. The market is moving towards more dynamic use cases: flexible bundles, roaming controls, app-led add-ons, family plans, contextual offers, lifestyle rewards and more advanced 5G services.

When the rating layer cannot respond in real time, people fill the gap. Teams reconcile usage, check exceptions, manually adjust accounts, investigate mismatches and build reports to catch problems that should have been resolved inside the system. The business keeps functioning, although the effort required to keep it functioning becomes increasingly invisible.

That hidden labour is one of the most underestimated costs in telco.

Data fragmentation is just as damaging. An AI-native telco needs a coherent view of the customer, yet legacy environments often scatter that view across billing, CRM, network systems, SIM management, care platforms and marketing tools. Identity sits in one place. Usage sits somewhere else. Payment history lives in another system. Product eligibility may depend on rules that were created during a migration years ago and are now understood by only a handful of people.

That creates a gap between the industry’s ambition and its operating reality.

Proactive churn prediction needs clean data. Personalised lifecycle marketing needs clean data. AI-enabled care needs clean data. Partner ecosystems need clean data. Without that foundation, AI becomes a layer of theatre placed over systems that cannot support the promise.

The same issue affects speed. Many new entrants come to market because they believe they can be more focused, more agile and more customer-led than the incumbents. That advantage is real, but it disappears quickly when the operating environment forces them into the same slow patterns. Product teams wait for change windows. Commercial teams wait for technical feasibility. Marketing teams wait for confirmation that the offer can actually be supported. Customer teams prepare scripts for issues the business already suspects will happen.

By the time the product is ready, the market has often moved.

That is why the next phase of MVNO growth will depend heavily on operating simplicity. The winners will still need strong propositions, competitive wholesale economics and smart distribution, but the deeper advantage will come from their ability to combine connectivity, automation, customer understanding and ecosystem partnerships at speed.

AI-native transformation is the right ambition for the sector. Lifestyle ecosystems are the right direction. Proactive customer engagement is the right conversation.

The hard part is making the stack underneath fit for that future.

Because connectivity may still be the product customers buy, but actual intelligence and laser like focus on value outside of plans, will increasingly decide which telcos they stay with.