RCS Business Messaging Traffic to Reach 415 Billion Globally by 2025, as CPaaS Platforms Drive Growth

RCS Business Messaging Traffic to Soar over Next Five Years

A new study from Juniper Research has found that RCS (Rich Communication Services) business messaging traffic will reach 415 billion messages by 2025; rising from 160 million messages in 2020. This represents a growth of 2,500%. It predicts that this substantial growth will be driven by the increasing popularity of CPaaS (Communications-as-a-Platform) services amongst brands and enterprises.

The new study, RCS Messaging: Emerging Opportunities, Monetisation Strategies & Market Forecasts 2020-2025, predicts that CPaaS platforms, which provide a centralised management service for outbound communications, will handle the majority of RCS business messaging traffic over the next five years. It argues that the ability of CPaaS platforms to fall back to the ubiquity of SMS will encourage brands and enterprises to explore RCS messaging whilst guaranteeing final message termination.

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CPaaS Platforms to Build Confidence

The study urges CPaaS providers to minimise the complexity of RCS over the next two years to encourage adoption as a business messaging technology. Although RCS enables more comprehensive billing mechanisms, the report urges CPaaS providers to keep a simple price-per-message billing system, similar to SMS business messaging, for familiarity.

Research author, Sam Barker, remarked: ‘As CPaaS platforms are increasingly adopted by brands and enterprises for outbound communication, they must leverage the rich-media nature of RCS to provide clear advantages over established SMS protocols and benefit from the increased revenue attainable from RCS busines messaging.’

Conversational Commerce

The research also identified two key areas that are critical to providing increased value of RCS over SMS: the introduction of conversational commerce and efficient brand authentication processes. Conversational commerce includes the eCommerce activities accomplished over RCS clients.

However, the report warns that CPaaS platforms must remain agile to changing demand in monetisation models, and must be open to future ecosystems where closer partnerships between CPaaS players and retailers create revenue sharing models and drive conversational commerce over RCS clients.

Source: Juniper Research media announcement