SMS Isn’t Going Anywhere, But It Is Changing. Here’s What’s Leading the Charge and Enabling Mobile Operators to Capitalize in 2023 and Beyond

How?

While roaming in terms of international travel has seen a significant decline the past few years as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic, messaging, conversely, has enjoyed considerable uplift since 2020 and continues to experience rapid growth—with regards to both volumes and revenue.

That’s because during the pandemic, local government mandates in major metropolitan areas ordered small-to-medium-sized businesses to shutter their physical locations, and with that, consequentially eliminated a major avenue that had previously enabled these companies to interact and communicate with their customers face-to-face. But what it also did was open up a door for white-labeled CPaaS providers to help these same businesses accelerate their digital transformations and continue to communicate with their customers through A2P/P2A SMS, which in the absence of a physical location, emerged as a reliable channel to maintain meaningful connections.

Furthermore, A2P SMS isn’t just driving revenue for well-known messaging aggregators such as Twilio, Infobip, Sinch, and others. Operators in this space can capitalize too—but only if they decide that they want to start monetizing A2P messaging traffic appropriately to their advantage, and act swiftly, to adopt a novel idea.

Introducing the Concept of a Carrier Messaging Hub

What if instead of employing third-party messaging aggregators to filter, route, and distribute the hundreds of millions of SMS text messages that traverse an operator’s network each day, YOU, as the operator, also became your own messaging aggregator?

It’s entirely possible with Syniverse’s Carrier Messaging Hub—a holistic, direct end-to-end solution that provides operators with the opportunity to efficiently monetize and gain greater control of their A2P messaging traffic by owning the direct relationships with enterprises, aggregators and sub-aggregators across multiple channels.

This allows you to open new revenue streams and improve margins, leverage your own brand and reputation to maintain customer loyalty, strengthen your existing enterprise customer relationships, create your own campaigns from compliance to the end customer experience, detect against spam, manage content classification, obtain greater control of your subscribers, and gain more visibility of all messaging activity on your network.

Why now?

In the pre-pandemic days before COVID, there simply wasn’t enough A2P traffic that made the idea of a messaging hub interesting, much less a viable option that would have been attractive enough for any operator to get behind. But the pandemic changed all that. This graphic shows the key verticals and specific industries that saw the most impact:

A Carrier Messaging Hub is a Gateway to Growth

Business messaging is growing, but a lot of us already knew that. Perhaps what’s less obvious is what a messaging hub can really do for an operator’s business. We, here at Syniverse, talk a lot about what operators can do to better manage relationships and facilitate distribution with their enterprise partners, as well as discuss new opportunities by shifting the existing model into becoming independent messaging aggregators. But now it’s time to show you.

Recently, I sat down with the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) to dive deeper into how operators can gain market share in the CPaaS market, and in the overall messaging ecosystem, when as of right now, so few MNOs are truly active. Here’s what I proposed:

• Enhance your existing operator business by becoming your own messaging aggregator
• Utilize a messaging hub solution to boost your bottom line by controlling messaging routing and channel monetization
• Earn your fair piece of the pie—don’t let current OTT providers steal this business away!
• Leverage your own operator brand with enterprise partners
• Gain greater visibility to who and what is on your network messaging your subscribers

If you didn’t get the chance to attend that session, you can view the full recording here:

A Small Glimpse Into the Bigger Picture

So, what does this mean for operators’ bottom lines?

With Mobilesquared’s most recent valuation of the A2P SMS messaging market set at approximately $15.5 billion USD, coupled with the rapid growth of messaging that industry research suggests will capture 2.8 billion users by 2022, the opportunity is multi-faceted: act now to begin monetizing this messaging activity for short-term gains, get ahead of OTTs for the sake of earning your fair share of the market, and future-proof your messaging business’s profitability as SMS volumes continue to soar.

From enjoying new revenue streams from A2P-based traffic and white-glove support, to mitigating the risk of becoming part of a larger industry-wide statistic that sees operators lose more than $8 billion USD each year from non-monetized messaging traffic, operators can win simply by partnering with Syniverse to overcome common challenges, including issues with SMS delivery rates, the proliferation of spam on your network, resource constraints and more.

Through our cost-effective, white-labeled, and multi-channel CPaaS platform that carries the look and feel of your brand, Syniverse continues its commitment to growing your messaging business with one dynamic solution.

Contact us or leave a comment below to discuss how we can streamline your messaging business today to maximize your profits—all with the end goal to elevate your position in the value chain.

Source: Juniper Research. A2P Messaging Executive Summary & Core Findings 2020-2025.