MEFTV speaks to Eric Brouard, Marketing Director at Netsize, part of Gemalto, about the current state of the A2P Messaging market and why he believe RCS is the way forward. 

“SMS has been around for a very very long time and used in so many different use cases but has reached its limits – it only 160 characters, black and white plain text – so although you can enrich the experience with a link and redirecting the user to a landing page, its still not a rich experience, so basically RCS has to move forward as a product and has to be provided to the end user and to brands as well for them to communicate to the end users.”

“From a technical standpoint, RCS is quite ready but now we need to drive adoption, which means for us market penetration, so as long as the carriers are not launching RCS widely, it will be very difficult for us to re-sell it to brands and customers. There is also the question around business models – with SMS it was very simple: one sms, one price – with RCS you get into the discussion around the per-message approach, per-session approach, per-active user per month approach – all that needs to be clarified. It’s moving forward, there are lots of requests and interest from brands, which drive the middle men towards more requests for the operators.”

Watch the full video below.