Rich Communication Services (RCS) business messaging will reach 415 billion messages globally by 2025, according to new research from Juniper Research.
This figure would represent a 2,500 per cent increase on this year’s figure of 160 million, which Juniper attributes to the increasing popularity of Communications-as-a-Platform (CPaaS) services.
RCS messaging is intended to be the successor of SMS messaging, delivering features that exist on OTT services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger such as group messaging and read receipts.
However, despite the projected increase in the popularity of business RCS messaging, SMS messaging is still popular, with Statista recording two trillion SMS messages sent in the USA alone in 2018.
Juniper says that the business uptake of RCS will stem from its incorporation of ecommerce services and brand authentication.
“As CPaaS platforms are increasingly adopted by brands and enterprises for outbound communication, they must leverage the rich-media nature of RCS to provide clear advantages over established SMS protocols and benefit from the increased revenue attainable from RCS busines messaging,” said Juniper lead analyst Sam Barker.
Currently, RCS messaging is the primary texting platform for Google phone users in the UK, France, Mexico and the US. Apple’s iMessage features many of the features available on RCS, so it has not yet implemented RCS.