As the demand increases for service providers to offer more services while continuing to support revenue growth from entertainment offerings and third-party content, the greatest impact is on the service provider’s network architecture. While it remains unseen in the background, it is here that the need for transactional services increases as the volume, complexity and real-time nature of next-generation transactions also increases. This paper will examine how policy and charging solutions have evolved towards a unified transactional policy architecture to enable these real-time session-based policy decisions, and accurately charge customers for service usage. In addition, it will outline how service providers can best take advantage of these solutions-and ultimately be first to market with the profitable next-generation services customers are seeking.