ACTION: Powerful business intelligence is worthless unless you take action to use it.

MNOs should grab the bull by the horns – and act now to gain mastery of their A2P revenue.

The booming A2P market is at a critical juncture. On one side – its rocketing success as the trusted business messaging medium of millions of global institutions and businesses.

On the other – its potential future deterioration, facilitated both by MNOs inertia in stopping revenue leakage to grey routes, and also from carriers failing to protect, and to capitalise on, the channel’s true business value.

The first step to A2P messaging success is installing a next-generation firewall, enabling MNOs full visibility and intelligence over the traffic passing through their network.

But we explain why it is the ACTION carriers then take on these insights – to plug sources of A2P leakage and to construct revenue drivers – that serves as the propulsive force needed to send profits skyward.

For many Mobile Network Operators, there has been a dawning realisation that a vast reservoir of revenue lies in an area of their business that had previously been hiding in plain sight – their A2P SMS channel.

Throughout the pandemic – and beyond – A2P became the trusted messaging medium chosen by healthcare and financial institutions across the world. Nearly eight million businesses have now recognised the great value of A2P as one of the most effective marketing tools there is for customer engagement.

With industry analyst Mobilesquared predicting the number of A2P messages sent each year to hit 2.62 trillion by 2025, the potential for further market expansion is huge.

Yet carriers have too frequently been rendered bystanders as A2P use cases have soared.  

Quite simply, they haven’t been able to convert this surge in market use and interest into the scale of profit they deserve – instead either doing nothing and putting up with sluggish A2P revenue, or, more commonly, selling off their A2P capacity to aggregators.

Part of the problem lies in the disconnect between MNO’s perceived revenue leakage – estimated to be around 10% – and actual revenue leakage – which research shows can be as high as 50%. 

Recent figures have shown that this leakage – from messages delivered over grey routes and through Sim Box activity – almost doubled in the pandemic, hitting an astonishing $13.5 billion of lost revenue in 2020.

This sum, if divided between every MNO, would mean an additional annual payment of $18 million each.  

And then there’s the millions in potential profit handed to aggregators – money that could be returned to carriers by cutting out these intermediaries and incentivising a culture of growth themselves.

So what is the solution to this monumental wastage, both in existing revenue loss and of future revenue creation? At HAUD, we believe the answer lies in PACE – Protect, Action, Create and Execute.

‘Protect’, as we explained here, refers to the vital first step of installing a next-generation firewall to guard an MNO’s network from grey route messaging fraud and spam. 

Crucially, for any monetisation strategy, this type of firewall also provides 360 degree visibility – and categorisation – over the type of A2P and RCS traffic passing over a carrier’s airwaves.

For most MNOs, the best option is to use partners – like leading firewall provider HAUD – due to the unparalleled degree of continuous analysis, testing both for vulnerabilities and market opportunities.

Next comes ‘Action’, and in this article we highlight its importance – not least as the spur to change culture in the first place, from one of A2P revenue loss and resignation to one of revenue defence and creation.

But also as the impetus to ACT on the powerful real-time insights gleaned from a progressive tech-filtered firewall, which works by bundling together and locking down illegitimate messages and analysing gaps in remaining traffic, many of which equate to missed revenue opportunities.

A billing and charging feature can then be introduced – to make sure carriers never miss a billable message – while routes with maximised revenue opportunities can be maximised.

As HAUD’s Head of Global Market Intelligence, Joanna Kuligowska, explained at 2022’s Mobile World Conference, action involves using the business intelligence gained from full-time network visibility as the essential architecture for effective A2P monetisation.

She added: “The ‘Action’ part of a truly successful A2P monetisation strategy is where partners like HAUD shine – as they provide the human expertise to monitor and analyse the traffic data, and then action the generated insights to fully deliver the dual programmes of revenue defence and revenue creation.”

But above all, MNOs must choose to take ‘Action’ today to stem the tide of lost revenue and achieve A2P messaging success.                  

Find out more about MRO and HAUD’s suite of tools to enable A2P revenues, enforce network protection and grow market share here or visit our contact page here.

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