Business Messaging Traffic Destined for Global Growth

Rich communication services (RCS) business messaging is transforming the way businesses communicate with their customers by providing a more engaging and interactive experience. A step beyond traditional SMS messaging, RCS messaging enables businesses to send messages that include images, videos, audio files, and interactive buttons, among other things. This means that businesses can use RCS to create more engaging and interactive campaigns, such as personalized product recommendations, customer service conversations, and appointment reminders.

As more businesses adopt this technology, a significant increase in the use of RCS for customer engagement and support is expected.

A new study by analyst firm Juniper Research predicts that operator business messaging traffic is destined to increase by 45% over the next four years, reaching 2.8 trillion messages by 2027, up from 1.9 trillion in 2023.

The main driver of the growth? RCS business messaging, which is expected to exceed 630 million messages by 2023, according to the survey. This plays a crucial role in platform vendors’ business messaging revenue.

The study also listed the vendors that scored well on the comprehensiveness of their platforms and their support for rich media technologies, specifically RCS: Infobip, CM.com, Vonage, Route Mobile and Sinch.

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

However, the report did issue a warning of a potential new challenge in the form of the GSMA's Open Gateway program, which could provide a low-cost alternative to SMS business messaging. The issue with this is that it poses direct competition to authentication use cases like MFA and one-time passwords, causing the growth of SMS revenue for messaging vendors to slow over the next four years.

The report suggested that messaging vendors develop and monetize RCS messaging services that leverage the conversational nature of the technology to counter this slowing growth.

Edited by Alex Passett