After 20 years of steady growth, is the A2P messaging space ready for a re-boot? Many insiders believe so. The truth is, the business of sending messages over operator networks (or ‘carrier networks’ as they are known in North America) is not controlled by the operators themselves.

Instead, an industry which is now worth around $50 billion a year is run by third party aggregators. Now, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Routing millions of messages to millions of consumers reliably? Establishing price structures? Managing enterprise relationships? Combating fraud?

These are considerable challenges. Aggregators have obviously done an admirable job of overcoming these barriers and creating a flourishing industry which didn’t exist just a couple of decades ago.

Recently, however, many mobile network operators (MNOs) have started to re-assess the status quo. The trigger? In most cases, COVID. The pandemic normalised mobile B2C messaging, and introduced many new enterprises to the channel. And this activity didn’t disappear with the end of the pandemic. A2P traffic spiked, and it continues to grow.

For many operators, this raised a fundamental question: how can we re-gain control of this important revenue stream?

Until fairly recently, only those MNOs with the will and the resources to build their own infrastructure and operational teams could answer this question.

But now, there is a more flexible option: the carrier messaging hub. It lets an MNO effectively licence all the functionality of an A2P platform from a specialist aggregator.

So will the hub concept take off? How will it change the role of the MNO? What will be the impact of aggregators? Will it reduce fraud, and bring more enterprises into the space?

The arrival of the carrier messaging hub could be a ‘sliding doors’ moment for the future of messaging. In this Future of Messaging: Carrier Edition guide, we will attempt to assess its impact and answer these questions.