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MEFTV speaks to Tata Communications’ Anurag Aggarwal – Associate Director of Messaging Services, about a broad range of topics, including the state of the global A2P messaging industry, the fight against grey routes, messaging fraud, and the future of RCS.

Discussing the state of A2P messaging and how the MNO’s are tackling grey routes and their business models. “What used to happen earlier is that operators struggled immensely with the challenge of grey routes and we’ve always seen sub 1 cent routes existing everywhere. What’s changed now is that the operators have finally found good and apt ways of securing the traffic and ensuring that they have 100% monetisation.

“The downside because of this development is that operators are now in a rush to cover the revenue losses they have seen – there’s a rampant race to increase the rates in the market, and we see operators who were typically at a 1 or 2 cent model are now easily asking for a 4 or 6 cents – the African space is one, eastern Europe is another – they’re all evolving to very high rates.

While overall revenue in the market is increasing, the end enterprise who wants to generate and build up traffic are facing budget crunches, and we see the overall traffic levels decreasing… traffic trends are dropping where the enterprise doesn’t find it beneficial to communicate via the A2P route – they’re working on in-app notifications, push notifications, voice enablement and other ways to reach consumers. It’s an appeal I’d make to all operators – let’s make sure we don’t end up shrinking the overall A2P volumes for the industry!”

Watch the full interview below.

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