And yet loss of trust could see the channel erode in an equally fast fashion – and that’s without the impact of OTT or SIM farm fraud undercutting existing revenue.

Meanwhile, of course, as use cases grow, so to do fraud threats – smishing, spoofing, spamming, and even other confidence breakers like artificially inflated traffic or message dumping continue to accelerate – all of them eating into hard won trust SMS has built up over 31+ years.

But maintaining the exceptional levels of trust that A2P SMS has, and stopping threats before they impact that level, is a complex interwoven set of challenges and connections.

In this session of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) Connects series, HAUD experts Joanna Kuligowska, Head of Global Market Intelligence and Ron Bonnici, VP Pre-Sales & Product Management, alongside Waheed Adam, iTouch, and Pat Flynn, Neustar, pick apart this complicated web.

With host James Williams, Director of Programmes at MEF leading the questioning, the panel discusses the SMS Trust Strategy and the need for deeper collaboration across all those involved in the A2P value chain – MNO’s, aggregators, and the brands sending the message.

Plus they examine the role regulation needs to plan in safeguarding users against fraud and spam – in particular the challenge of offering robust protection in the face of challenges like regulated blocking of content inspections.

The team also considers the role of education in preventing fraud – and increasing trust – both at the individual user level, but also at the brand level too – understanding ways they can help keep users safe from URL pre-registration to only using authorised channels.