MVNO platform looks to add connectivity, not complexityMVNO platform looks to add connectivity, not complexity

Network-as-a-service startup OXIO hopes to simplify how businesses connect their customers, products, partners and devices. Its platform enables businesses to offer everything from pre-provisioned IoT devices to private-label phone plans, and it handles the difficult bit – connecting to carriers, getting access to wholesale data and minutes, streamlining their billing processes and making services possible that current telco billing systems and business models can't handle.

Nicolas Girard, the company's co-founder and CEO, said OXIO aimed to make dealing with telecom network services more transactional, as AWS did with data center complexity. With AWS, he said, you can now just order computing, servers and storage on demand. Similarly, he said OXIO could make the connectivity barriers disappear for other carriers and businesses alike.

In Latin America, a convenience store chain with a loyal customer base can go from reselling prepaid phones to being its own MVNO, for example. While OXIO handles the connectivity and telecom-facing stuff, the convenience store can offer more mobile data on its plans as an incentive to prompt customers to purchase more from its stores. It can also do promotions with brands in-store, increasing customer loyalty and giving it more revenue from its most frequent visitors.

In this interview, Girard also discusses how media and banking brands see potential in offering connectivity and financial services to Latinos who live in the US and frequently visit and send money back to their families in Latin America. Serving that audience is a tall order for telcos, who are focused on their regional networks and only work across borders when huge enterprise customers are footing the bill.

Girard said he'll be successful if they can make months-long telecom processes take only a few minutes. "So what we're trying to do is, you know, be able to have a conversation on Monday and launch something on Friday," he said.