SMS messaging revenue for operators will fall from $66 billion in 2020 to $61 billion by 2025 due to declining P2P traffic, Juniper Research said.

The report found that operator-led mobile messaging revenue will increase from $87 billion in 2020 to $88 billion in 2025.

Mobile operators will need to accelerate investment into rich media technologies to offset the loss of SMS revenue. Operators need to capitalize on premium pricing and advanced anti-fraud standards over these messaging channels to accomplish this.

Operators will take advantage of the growing interest in omnichannel strategies to foster increased investment in rich media messaging standards, including RCS and MMS.

The US is anticipated to account for 54 percent of MMS and RCS traffic globally by 2025. It highlighted the ability of messaging platforms in the US to offer a comprehensive portfolio of messaging products; enabling enterprises to leverage rich media messaging for high-value marketing use cases. Low-cost services, such as SMS, can be used for simple use cases, such as one-time passwords.

The ability of RCS to authenticate enterprises directly will provide more efficient anti-fraud detection and mitigation of mobile business messaging traffic over established SMS traffic analysis.

Juniper Research author Scarlett Woodford said: “Authenticating the source of messaging traffic via RCS is more efficient at eliminating fraudulent traffic routes than traditional firewalls, however, RCS traffic must still be monitored for malicious and unwanted content. A failure to do so will diminish the value of rich media messaging services.”