Bridge Alliance and Singtel partner to launch regional telco API exchange powered by Singtel Paragon platform

Bridge Alliance API exchange (BAEx) enables regional and multinational enterprises to gain seamless access to multi-market telco assets, unlocking new innovation and business opportunities

SINGAPORE, July 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Bridge Alliance, a leading mobile alliance of 34 member operators worldwide, and Singtel, a leading communications technology group in Asia, today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate regional Application Programming Interface (API) federation with a telco API exchange powered by Singtel's Paragon, the all-in-one orchestration platform for telco networks.

Bridge Alliance is launching the Bridge Alliance API Exchange (BAEx), which leverages Paragon to aggregate its member operators' network authentication, user verification and network quality APIs. With BAEx, enterprises and developers can streamline the deployment of new services on member operator networks by accessing a common API framework, which provides secure, consistent and on-demand access to telco network capabilities across multiple regions. This enables the regional aggregation and standardisation of telco APIs utilising CAMARA^[1] APIs.

Building on Singtel and Bridge Alliance's experience with its ecosystem of member telecom operators, BAEx will significantly reduce complexity and friction for enterprise customers, developers, and solution providers through its unified integration, simplified commercial framework and common operational support model. The APIs offered will support regional and global enterprise use cases in fintech, e-commerce and over-the-top providers starting with network authentication, user verification and location tracking functions. This will also help enterprises accelerate time-to-market to launch their services and reduce the complexity of working with multiple telecommunication operators.

Mr Mike Heffner, VP of Enterprise Platforms at Singtel's Digital InfraCo, said, "Enterprises that have operations spanning multiple countries and regions, will depend on reliable, high-quality connectivity to meet their mission-critical business needs and ensure seamless operations. We are pleased to collaborate with Bridge Alliance to leverage Singtel Paragon's capabilities and offer a unified and consistent way to manage, orchestrate and expose APIs of its member telecommunication operators. This partnership will enable both Singtel and Bridge Alliance to support our customers' use cases requiring dynamic and granular control of regional telco networking capabilities."

Dr Ong Geok Chwee, CEO of Bridge Alliance, said, "We are delighted to advance API federation leveraging Singtel's Paragon platform. Through BAEx as a single interface enabling regional consumption of telco APIs, we aim to accelerate telco API exposure to enable our member operators to serve the needs of enterprise customers. An open telco API economy is key to creating new business opportunities for enterprises. To achieve this, we invite communications service providers and industry players to partner BAEx in unlocking the value of telco capabilities."

For more information about Singtel's Paragon platform, please visit: www.singtel.com/business/products-services/5g/paragon

For more information on BAEx and working with BAEx on enterprise use cases, please visit  www.bridgealliance.com/baex.

About Bridge Alliance

Bridge Alliance, the leading mobile alliance for premier operators and their customers in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, celebrates its 20^th anniversary in 2024. Founded by seven leading operators in 2004 with a focus on regional roaming, our alliance today covers 34 members who serve over 1 billion customers collectively across these regions. Our goal is to build group capabilities and create value for our members by enabling compelling roaming services and experience, offering multi-market enterprise and IoT solutions, and delivering savings and benefits through leveraging group economies.

Bridge Alliance's members and partners include: Airtel (India, Sri Lanka and the Airtel subsidiaries in Africa: Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), AIS (Thailand), China Telecom (Mainland China), China Unicom (Mainland China), CSL Mobile (Hong Kong), CTM (Macau), Globe Telecom (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), Metfone (Cambodia), MobiFone (Vietnam), Optus (Australia), Singtel (Singapore), SK Telecom (South Korea), stc (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait), SoftBank Corp. (Japan), Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan), and Telkomsel (Indonesia).

For more information, visit www.bridgealliance.com.

About Singtel

Singtel is a leading Asian communications technology group, operating next-generation connectivity, digital infrastructure and digital businesses including regional data centre arm Nxera and regional IT services arm NCS. The Group has presence in Asia, Australia and Africa and reaches over 780 million mobile customers in 21 countries.

For consumers, Singtel delivers a complete and integrated suite of services, including mobile, broadband and TV. For enterprises, Singtel offers a complementary array of workforce mobility solutions, data hosting, cloud, network infrastructure, analytics and cyber security capabilities.

Singtel is dedicated to continuous innovation, harnessing technology to create new and exciting customer experiences, support enterprises in their digital transformation and shape a more sustainable, digital future.

For more information, visit www.singtel.com.

[1] CAMARA is an open source project within Linux Foundation to define, develop and test the APIs. CAMARA works in close collaboration with the GSMA Operator Platform Group to align API requirements and publish API definitions and APIs. Harmonisation of APIs is achieved through fast and agile created working code with developer-friendly documentation.