With October over, we are fast approaching the end of yet another eventful year. In the meantime, we have prepared another dose of telco and mobile messaging news to get you up to speed with the market.
The advent of the Messageverse
According to Mobilesquared’s recent article, messaging will be the next major platform for brands to invest in, as messaging spending will soon exceed their social media expenses.
To reflect this overwhelming necessity for brands to understand consumers’ messaging behaviour and follow their customers to their preferred platforms, Mobilesquared has coined the term “The Messageverse”. In their own words, it embraces messaging platforms used for business messaging such as SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, RCS, WeChat, Line, KakaoTalk, Facebook Messenger, Apple Messages for Businesses, Telegram, Signal, and “all other messaging platforms that remain active, and also those platforms of the future yet to be conceived”.
According to Mobilesquared, there will be a total of 5.55 billion users in the Messageverse by the end of 2022 since messaging is king when it comes to effectiveness or interactivity. Most messages sent as part of a campaign are read within minutes.
As a result, the Messageverse is a significant component of CPaaS. According to Mobilesquared’s data, the Messageverse accounted for 77.71% of total brand spending on CPaaS in 2020 and 66.15% in 2022.
If you want to expand your messaging capabilities and bring your engagement to a new level, you might want to learn more about our CPaaS offering.
A2P SMS Messaging Market Size to reach USD 89.2 Billion by 2030
According to Beyond Market Insights (BMI), the global A2P SMS Messaging market might grow from 62.2bn in 2021 to 89.2bn by 2030, with a CAGR of 4.1% from 2022 to 2030.
As hinted in the Mobilesquared entry above, this growth can be attributed to the increasing adoption of smartphone & internet services and OTT platforms, as well as a necessity for customer and employee engagement. As A2P SMS Messaging use is increasing among businesses of all sizes, mobile operators will benefit from the increased messaging volumes.
However, getting the most out of the A2P messaging business requires knowledge, visibility and tools that might only be available for some carriers. Fortunately, we are happy to support your messaging monetisation journey and protect your revenues.
Europe’s telcos demand U.S. Big Tech pay for infrastructure upgrades
According to CNBC, European carriers are pushing regulators to consider implementing a framework where the companies that send traffic along their networks are charged a fee. Said payments will help fund the ongoing infrastructure upgrades vital for delivering immense volumes of data generated by platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix.
As the idea garners political support in France, Italy and Spain, among other countries, the European Commission plans to start looking into the issue early next year.
While previous attempts to strike individual network compensation deals with tech giants were brought down by the regulators anticipating “significant harm” to the internet ecosystem, the conversation shifted after the massive traffic spike caused by the pandemic, with Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix accounting for more than 56% of all global data traffic in 2021.
While the exact mechanism for collecting such fees is still being discussed, the recent cost of living crisis is another concern, as there is a risk that Big Tech will lay the new expenses over consumers’ shoulders.
Whatever the outcome, we will keep a close eye on the situation that has the potential to disrupt the telco industry soon.
Singapore strengthens up its defences against SMS fraud
Mobile World Live reports that Singapore has introduced a government-backed central enterprise registry and mandated mobile operators to deploy firewall solutions to block potential SMS scams.
The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) stated that by end-January 2023 all organisations using SMS sender IDs must register with the country’s vendor registry. According to IMDA, the number of SMS scams dropped by 64% between Q4 2021 and Q2 2022.
Once registration is mandated, only sender IDs belonging to organisations will be allowed, with all others being blocked. All non-registered SMS sender IDs after the deadline will be marked as potential scams.
Operators are required to deploy anti-scam solutions in their networks starting end of October 2022.
Customer experience matters nearly as much as your products or services
Recent customer engagement research by Salesforce reveals new facts about customer needs and expectations that might help brands gain more trust with their audiences.
According to the report, trust becomes the main currency in times of change, with 88% of customers sharing this sentiment. Moreover, while confidence in governments might have reduced recently, 68% of customers appear to trust companies to act with society’s best interest in mind — a significant leap from the 59% in Salesforce’s 2020 survey.
Another significant development is the heavy emphasis on customer experience, with an all-time-high of 88% of respondents stating that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. And being used to engaging with their favourite brands online, consumers expect a digital-first approach with a heavy emphasis on personalised offerings and experiences, which may be facilitated with wider AI adoption.
A new Viber chatbot to help Ukrainian teachers
A new “Teach the Teachers” by Rakuten Viber and Ukrainian educational studio EdEra offers free online courses to help nearly 450,000 Ukrainian teachers resolve challenges like organising homework, keeping attendance records and monitoring knowledge, engaging students during distance learning or organising a chat with students and parents.
This initiative is essential for Ukraine, with a recent survey by the Viber team in Ukraine showing that with the ongoing war, 66% of respondents will study online, and another 19% will pursue a hybrid of remote and in-person study.
Boasting a 98% penetration in Ukraine, Viber “has become one of the key tools for communication for remote learning…” says Ofir Eyal, CEO of Rakuten Viber, in his interview for ISRAEL21c. Since remote and hybrid education continues in other European regions, the chatbot will also be available in Greece and Bulgaria.