Skip to main content

MEF Director of Programmes James Williams shares his impressions from the recent MEF CONNECTS Business Messaging event in Amsterdam (now available to view on demand), and looks ahead to the future of the sector and upcoming MEF Events.

Time flies and it’s hard to believe I have now been part of the MEF team for 1.5 years. Until fairly recently opportunities for face-to-face interaction with members and other industry stakeholders had been few and far between but thankfully things have been changing and it was a real pleasure to get over to Amsterdam to host MEF CONNECTS Business Messaging 2022!

Thanks to all of you who joined us in person and to the hundreds of you who joined live online too. The whole event is available to watch on demand now, so if you missed it, dive in here!

With two-thirds of our members part of the Future of Messaging programme, it’s crystal clear The area of Business Messaging is one of real interest for so many across the MEF community globally. Today there are so many mobile digital channels out there organisations of all sizes and types can reach for when it comes to conversing with their customers and potential customers yet so few businesses actually use them today.

  In-depth research from MEF member Mobilesquared shows that of the over 300 million listed companies around the world barely 5% use business messaging. If any of you were in any doubt about the huge headroom for growth there is in the sector, then that fact alone speaks volumes surely? Hundreds of millions of SMEs in particular are yet to leverage the opportunities…

In-depth research from MEF member Mobilesquared shows that of the over 300 million listed companies around the world barely 5% use business messaging. If any of you were in any doubt about the huge headroom for growth there is in the sector, then that fact alone speaks volumes surely? Hundreds of millions of SMEs in particular are yet to leverage the opportunities.

The likes of chat apps and RCS lend themselves perfectly to the area of customer support too and that itself is worth a cool USD 1 trillion+/year, so imagine if a percentage of that moved over to be covered off by Messaging, that’d give Messaging a fantastic boost! The potential of Business Messaging is clearly vast.

As Business Messaging grows further though, it becomes an even more attractive target for bad actors around the world looking to part people and organisations from their cash unwittingly and illegally though. Sophisticated criminals have moved into the space and we clearly saw during the event from diverse sessions that fraud and criminality is on the rise.

The only way to effectively target this criminality is for stakeholders from across Mobile to come together and collaborate on anti-fraud approaches, processes and best practice. Technology needs to adapt and managed services need to keep pace with the changing dynamics of the market.

And here at MEF our members are finding we offer a great forum for interacting with one another, sharing insight and ultimately making a real positive impact.

We’ve got plenty more events this year (whether our own or run in collaboration with a raft of industry partners) looking at the topic of Business Messaging so do join us for those. It’s important for MEF to not become an echo chamber so we welcome opportunities to speak with non-members at every turn too.]

Next week in London you’ll catch a good number of the MEF team in person at our partner Capacity Media’s Messaging & SMS World on June 28th and 29th (we have our own meetup on the 27th too – sign up for that here) and MEF’s RCS World event at Google’s premises in Dublin on July 12th and 13th is capturing the imagination of so many of you too!

You’ll next see me in action during MEF CONNECTS Digital Transformation on July 18th and 19th (register here) as I will soon be off for a few days holiday. Enjoy everything we are putting on for you in the interim!

Thanks to all of you for your ongoing support with all things MEF and huge thanks to all members who sponsor physical events making them possible. And for MEF CONNECTS Business Messaging, that was principal sponsor LANCK Telecom along with ENEA AdaptiveMobile Security, HAUD, iBASIS, Infobip, Intis Telecom and XConnect. Very much appreciated.

James Williams

Director of Programmes, MEF

  

MEF Connects  Business Messaging – On Demand

Showcasing the latest developments and use-cases from aggregators, Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers, mobile network operators, over-the-top (OTT) messaging providers and technology suppliers.

Watch all session on Demand now

MEF