Juniper Research forecasts global operator-led mobile messaging revenue will increase from $87 billion in 2020 to $88 billion in 2025. SMS messaging will fall from $66 billion in 2020 to $61 billion by 2025. The researcher attributes this to declining peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic.
The Juniper report, Mobile Messaging: Future Outlook, Strategic Recommendations & Market Forecasts 2021-2025, predicts that operators will need to accelerate investment into rich media technologies to offset the loss of SMS revenue over the next 5 years.
Rich Media becomes key for operators’ messaging revenue
The report predicts that operators will take advantage of the growing interest in omnichannel strategies to foster increased investment in rich media messaging standards, including RCS and MMS.
The report urges messaging platforms to emulate the market in the US, where the country is anticipated to account for 54% of global MMS and RCS traffic globally by 2025.
It highlighted the ability of messaging platforms in the US to offer a comprehensive portfolio of messaging products; enabling enterprises to leverage rich media messaging for high-value marketing use cases.
Conversely, low‑cost services, such as SMS, can still be used for simple use cases, such as one-time passwords.
It urges operators to capitalise on premium pricing and advanced anti-fraud standards over these messaging channels to accomplish this.
How to protect messaging revenue
Additionally, the ability of RCS to authenticate enterprises directly will provide more efficient anti-fraud detection and mitigation of mobile business messaging traffic over established SMS traffic analysis.
Research author Scarlett Woodford remarked, ‘Authenticating the source of messaging traffic via RCS is far more efficient at eliminating fraudulent traffic routes than traditional firewalls, however, RCS traffic must still be monitored for malicious and unwanted content. A failure to do so will diminish the value of rich media messaging services in the future.’
