The big interview: the cash must flow

Globalisation is a bit like Marmite – some love it, others hate it. While both Brexit and the election of President Trump can both be seen as a reaction against it, large (and growing) parts of the business world are focused on grappling with the complexity of modern supply chains and the way that many operations, business people and increasingly connected objects crisscross international boundaries. Meanwhile, others are concentrating on providing the technology that helps this complex and intricate dance happen in a smooth and predictable way.

One company that firmly slots into the latter category is Syniverse, which through its mobile roaming services underpins a great deal of the experience we have come to expect when we get off a plane, turn on our phones, get a text message from our local mobile network operator (MNO), and – possibly after buying a data package – proceed to use them as normal. Chris Rivera, Syniverse’s CTO, says this includes handling “all the billing, reconciliation and records” that is needed to work out the revenue sharing between the user’s MNO and the network they are roaming on. While such a task may not be glamorous, it is an important one – as anyone who has experienced a full-blown dispute over the splitting of a restaurant bill can attest to.