Mobile business messaging traffic set to grow to 2.8 trillion by 2027, driven by RCS (Rich Communication Services)

A new market report warned that a potential new challenge is emerging in the form of the GSMA’s Open Gateway programme. This will enable the development of new authentication services that could provide a low-cost alternative to SMS business messaging.

A new study from Juniper Research, foremost experts in mobile messaging markets, has forecast that operator business messaging traffic will reach 2.8 trillion messages by 2027; rising from 1.9 trillion in 2023.

This growth of 45% over the next four years will be driven by RCS (Rich Communication Services) business messaging which is anticipated to surpass 630 million messages by 2027; playing an increasingly important role in platform vendors’ business messaging revenue.

Top 20 Mobile Messaging Vendors Ranked

As part of the study, Juniper Research released its latest Competitor Leaderboard for 2023. Underpinned by a robust scoring methodology and coupled with participant interviews, the new Competitor Leaderboard ranked the top 20 leading mobile messaging platforms, using criteria such as the completeness of their solutions and their future business prospects.

The top 5 vendors for 2023: 1) Infobip, 2) CM.com, 3) Vonage, 4) Route Mobile, 5) Sinch

The research found that the leading players scored well on the comprehensiveness of their platforms and their support for rich media technologies, most notably RCS.

Industry-wide API to Provide Challenges for Leading Vendors

The report warned that a potential new challenge is emerging in the form of the GSMA’s Open Gateway programme. This will enable the development of new authentication services that could provide a low-cost alternative to SMS business messaging.

These emerging authentication services will provide direct competition to authentication use cases, such as MFA (Multi-factor Authentication) and OTPs (One-time Passwords), causing the growth of SMS revenue for these messaging vendors to slow over the next four years. In turn, the report urges messaging vendors to develop and monetise RCS messaging services that leverage the conversational nature of the technology to counter this slowing growth.

Research co-author Elaine Rashbrook remarked: “The importance of RCS in business messaging has never been higher. These leading vendors must promote RCS’ rich media capabilities to maintain revenue growth over messaging channels.”

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Find out more about the new report: Mobile Messaging: Technology Analysis, Regional Evaluation & Market Forecasts 2023-2027