Ofcom has been pressuring UK MNOs to stop ripping off their customers at the end of their contracts and O2 has been the first to act.

One of the secrets of success if you work in a regulated industry is turning new regulations to your advantage. When they can get away with it all operators rip off their customers whenever they can, whether it’s exorbitant roaming fees, punitive charges for going over your allowance or failing to let you know when you’ve paid off your handset.

The smart MNOs are the ones that make a virtue out of doing what they’re compelled to by the regulator and that seems to be what O2 has done with the launch of its Overpayment Estimator. It’s actually a fairly rudimentary tool that just asks you about your current contract, tells you what you could save if you switch to O2 when it ends and then invites you to set a calendar reminder to switch to O2 when that happens.

The fact that this is even a thing is an indictment of how UK MNOs treat their own customers. It’s surely not beyond the capabilities of modern BSS to create an internal calendar marker at the start of a contract that automatically notifies them when it has finished and yet that often doesn’t happen. The only plausible explanation can be that they want their customers to keep paying over the odds and that’s not cool.

“It is simply not right that consumers across the UK are being charged for a phone they already own,” said Mark Evans, CEO of O2. “You wouldn’t keep giving money to your mortgage provider if you’d finished payments and owned your house – so why should it be that way for your phone? The mobile industry does not have the best track record on transparent billing practices.  Our Overpayment Estimator is another positive move towards changing that.”

O2 has something called ‘custom plans, which it says don’t charge customers for their phones once they’re paid off and automatically lower their bills. If some of its competitors are still doing that sort of thing then O2 deserves some credit for exploiting this window of opportunity while it’s still open. The technology presumably exists to only charge people for what they use, but there’s no point in trying to walk before you can crawl is there?