RCS Business Messaging opportunities for operators

Business messaging is a revenue growth opportunity for telecoms operators. Approximately 1.8 trillion application-to-person (A2P) messages were sent worldwide in 2020, around 70% of which used SMS. The market is growing strongly and is expected to continue to do so over the next few years. We forecast that the total number of A2P messages sent worldwide will increase to over 4 trillion per year by 2026, generating USD37 billion in annual revenue.

Most of the growth in the market will be driven by the benefits of IP-based messaging. The results of our survey of 600 businesses show that most companies plan to continue to use legacy channels such as email and SMS, but expect to increase their reliance on IP-based channels. The use cases supported by A2P messaging are evolving from marketing messages and notifications to two-way interactions such as customer services.