Why have we created your portal

We liked the way we did it before,
It worked, and it was easy for everyone

So why have we gone to the effort to create a portal for you?
There are a few reasons but two big ones are:

GDPR – becomes a legal requirement on the 25th May 2018

  • Telecoms companies have to treat your phone bill as protected data
  • It wouldn’t be compliant with this law to still send telephone bills the “old way” after 25th MayThe new EU data protection regulations is much stricter than the current data protection laws in the UK, they classify a lot more as protected data. A telephone bill is different to a “normal” invoice as it contains information about your communication history. This means that if UK Wholesale or any other telecoms company continued to email telephone bills as attachments after 25th May 2018 they would not be complying with GDPR.

Some companies may not be concerned about their invoice falling in to the wrong hands, but all telecoms companies have to abide by the new regulation. So we have found the easiest way to make it as close as possible to how it was before whilst ensuring that we are compliant with the the new data protection laws.

Ransomware attacks such as the one on NHS in 2017

  • How was it spread ?

“It comes with an email attachment. Like invoice, shipment or any tracking document. It looks so generic that users are compelled to click on those attachments.
You will get these kind of emails. The moment you click on the attachment… Voillaaaaaaa. Hackers hit the jackpot.”
~ source: https://medium.com/@daredevilashish/everything-you-need-to-know-about-wannacry-ransomware-virus-65cb95ee3f89

Obviously our emails with the invoice attached wasn’t a ransomware virus, but the internet security programs that protect your email boxes from spam and viruses went in to overdrive as the security companies refined their algorithms to prevent ransomware viruses reaching email inboxes.

Too many of our customers started to have missing invoices as a result of their mail companies refined algorithms overreacting and incorrectly identifying our email with the attached invoice as a threat as it fit the profile of a ransomware viruses email. We encouraged customers to  “add us to their email safe senders list” to help our genuine invoices reach them.

We never want our customers to be searching for missing invoices and it was apparent that despite our advice to add us to their “safe senders list” it was never going to be the same reliable way of delivering invoices as it once was. This was also an important factor as we looked for the best solution which was as similar to the way that we was doing it, but tackled this very important and growing problem to make life as easy as possible for all customers.