Chief Executive Officer urges firms to ditch roaming

eSIMatic Chief Executive Officer Berk Bayraktar has urged companies to move away from international mobile roaming for business connectivity, arguing that many still rely on outdated arrangements for cross-border mobile access.

He said mobile connectivity is still often treated as a poorly understood cost centre rather than core business infrastructure. That approach leaves procurement and IT teams with limited visibility over spending, while staff travelling abroad make ad hoc decisions about how to get online.

As a result, international data costs can be hard to forecast and difficult to audit. It can also raise security concerns when employees turn to public Wi-Fi networks or costly hotel internet connections to avoid roaming charges or compensate for weak access arrangements.

The comments reflect a broader shift in how companies manage international operations. With multinational supply chains, remote teams and overseas client meetings now embedded in day-to-day business, access to mobile data has become a basic operational requirement for staff on the move.

Bayraktar argued that the telecoms industry has maintained a pricing structure that lacks transparency for corporate users. "For too long, connectivity has been managed as a 'black box,' with roaming charges that are often 10 to 100 times higher than local data rates," said Bayraktar, Chief Executive Officer of eSIMatic.

He added: "The industry has relied on opaque, tiered agreements that offer no transparency and no incentive for operators to provide fair pricing. This isn't just an expense issue; it's a failure of operational strategy. Businesses are effectively subsidising a legacy system that was never designed for the speed of today's global economy."

Hidden costs

Beyond the headline roaming bill, Bayraktar pointed to time lost by travelling staff who need to arrange local connectivity after arriving in a new country. He described physical SIM cards as another source of friction for companies trying to keep employees connected abroad.

Frequent business travellers can spend hours finding local vendors, dealing with unfamiliar languages and swapping SIM cards before regaining routine access to email, messaging and cloud systems, he said. Across large teams, those delays add up to a significant loss of working time.

The issue is not only administrative. Delays in getting connected can disrupt meetings, document transfers and decision-making, especially when employees are moving between airports, hotels, customer sites and regional offices.

Bayraktar framed that loss as a drag on commercial activity as well as internal coordination. "Every minute an executive spends troubleshooting their phone is a minute they aren't closing a deal or supporting a team," he said.

He added: "The true cost of poor connectivity is rarely found on a single invoice. It is found in the deal that wasn't closed because the signal dropped, the document that wasn't sent, or the manager who was unavailable during a critical decision."

Digital shift

eSIMatic is promoting a model in which mobile access is provisioned digitally and managed centrally by the employer. The approach can give businesses more consistent oversight of data use across travelling staff and international teams.

Bayraktar said a managed system could make spending more predictable, reduce set-up time and improve compliance with internal security policies. He argued that replacing informal workarounds with standardised mobile access would also help companies reduce dependence on unsecured networks.

eSIMatic said centralised data management can cut international data costs by up to 80% compared with traditional roaming tariffs. It added that removing the need for physical SIM distribution and manual set-up would allow employees to spend more time on customer work and less on technical fixes.

The wider argument is that connectivity decisions should sit alongside other core operational systems rather than remain a fragmented travel expense. For businesses with staff crossing borders regularly, the debate is moving beyond telecoms pricing into workforce management, security control and budget planning.

"Businesses that treat connectivity as a managed utility will find themselves more agile and better equipped to navigate global opportunities," said Bayraktar.

He added: "We are moving into a world where borderless work is the norm. It is time the infrastructure supporting that work caught up."