The value of A2P messaging has never been so high – both in economic and in societal terms. 

Throughout the past year and a half, as the pandemic swept across the world, A2P messaging has been critical to supporting people and the operations that serve them.

A2P and P2A have enabled business. It’s allowed more secure transactions to occur, deeper relationships to be formed, marketing to be sent, and secure messaging to take place.

It’s also enabled health authorities to help people stay safe, to warn of increasing infection rates and to offer advice – to name but a few services we have seen A2P used for.

Research from Mobile Squared shows that total business usage – covering A2P and P2A across SM, RCS and Whatsapp – amounted to 1.64 trillion messages in 2019, and is forecast to more than double by the end of 2024.

That equates to global A2P SMS market revenue growth from USD 62.1bn in 2020 to USD 72.8bn by 2025 – as this report shows.

The reason for this growth is quite simple – SMS is, uniquely, deliverable to all mobile phone users, and has historically shown itself to be both secure and has high customer engagement levels.

Yet, despite the increasingly proven value this channel offers, Mobile Network Operators face several challenges when it comes to maximising their revenue from it. 

This e-guide is designed to help MNOs pick apart those challenges and turn them into opportunities. It’s about securing existing lines of income, growing new revenue streams, and doing this in a sustainable, predictable, way.

Over the course of the following pages, we will look at strategies MNO’s can implement to build as much recurring revenue as possible from SMS, based on HAUD’s Messaging Revenue Optimisation (MRO) program.

Ultimately, it’s about redefining the role A2P SMS can play within your overall business strategy, and ensuring you are capturing and protecting all the revenue your network can deliver. 

We hope you find this valuable.

Messaging Revenue Optimisation

For most mobile network operators, A2P SMS is still a sleeping giant – an undervalued channel that isn’t optimised for revenue.

That’s unsurprising. Typically, growing revenue from A2P SMS has been both complicated and laborious – too many customers to deal with for relatively little reward.

That has led many MNOs to more or less park the channel – focusing on other areas of their business which seem more lucrative.

The result of that has been a mix of undervalued wholesale access, coupled with lax network oversight about what traffic, and from where, is passing over their radio spectrum and reaching their customers.

Where operators have sought to take action, they have frequently fallen back on either simply selling off their capacity to aggregators, or attempting to jack up prices – neither of which are effective long-term strategies.

However before we get onto what alternative opportunities MNOs can use to claw back control of their messaging revenue, we first need to understand some of the issues surrounding A2P SMS messaging, and how they impact operators revenue lines.