DT’s Noel Wirzius asked our expert panel of Orange’s Otilia Anton, David del Val from Telefonica and MEO’s CTO Jose Pedro Nascimento for their views
At Mobile Europe’s recent Telco to Techco virtual event, Deutsche Telekom’s (DT’s) Noel Wirzius, who is Product Lead for Network APIs working on the CAMARA and Open Gateway project, moderated the session on network APIs. Otilia Anton, Telco APIs Program Director with Orange, David del Val, Global Director of Open Gateway at Telefónica and José Pedro Nascimento, CTO of Portugal’s MEO made up our panel.
This was a lively and wide-ranging discussion, embracing the current successes and trials, from the financial sector to social media and civil engineering, in geographies as widely dispersed as the UK and Brazil.
Watch the video on-demand here.
Each of the panellists outlined their commercial offerings so far and talked about the level of interest in them, from Brazil to the UK, with most common use cases being in security and authentication, such as the use of ID-verification as an anti-fraud measure for instance in financial services, with some of the biggest banks as partners.
Telefónica’s del Val said, ‘We’re seeing that with the new portfolio of APIs that we are launching every month or every quarter…a lot of customer interest that they are all of them – I mean almost all the customers that we contact [to see] if it can solve any business critical mission that they have.”
del Val also said, “Big social networks like Tiktok [are] using number verification for user onboarding as a better, faster way. They were reporting an improvement of 30% in the onboarding success.” It is now also working with WhatsApp for onboarding in Spain.
DT’s Wirzius he asked the panellists for what hurdles remain to achieve scale.
Nascimento thinks one big question is whether operators should look to commercialise APIs themselves or also look to hyperscalers, and pondered what their role and a commercial model involving them could be. He thinks there could be several commercial models, but noted none is as yet well defined.
Del Val said not all developers are aware of Open Gateway, and that operators need to get more APIs on more markets, faster – and, as in the case of testing WhatsApp in Spain, it is easier to do when all the operators within a country market are involved. Also that some customers need “hand holding” rather using a “self-serve” model which elongates the sales cycle. However, he is optimisitic: “It won’t take a lot of time, because…for instance, in banking, everybody knows about SIM swap number, verification, etc. So now we’re starting to get leads coming directly from the customers that are asking.”
Orange’s Anton said its experience had been that setting up the first offer in a market was an important milestone and, acknowledging del Val’s point, that Orange has speeded up considerably in the last year on the supply side, but thinks “the feedback loop” is too big a lag between the work in CAMARA, working with customers “in anticipation” and adapting “those proposals to the reality of the customer”.
Anton also talked about the ongoing work in “replicability” to scale rapidly across geographies, noting, “I think we are on the right path as an industry towards that.”
A discussion about which sectors were the most likely to mature next followed, including allowing customers to configure and manage their own networks and the likely impact of the imminent introduction of network slicing. Anton mentioned its work with Certifico, which certifies documents for industries such as civil engineering, to reduce fraud as an example of something it had not thought about until it was approached.
They finished by giving their predictions for what the API market will look like in 2030…watch the video on-demand here.
