A study by Juniper Research finds that AI-powered firewalls for business SMS are reducing illegitimate traffic.
The study from Juniper Research found that operators’ revenue from SMS business traffic will reach $50 billion (€42.43 billion) in 2025; increasing from $39.6 billion in 2020.
This represents overall growth of 26%, driven by the reduction in illegitimate traffic due to the implementation of SMS firewalls.
The new study, A2P Messaging: SMS, RCS & OTT Business Messaging 2020-2025, found that fraudulent traffic will decrease by 75% over the forecast period, from 539 billion messages in 2020 to 138 billion in 2025.
Operators will experience benefits as traffic delivered over legitimate channels increases, with operator revenue lost to illegitimate channels drastically reducing from $5.8 billion in 2020 to $1.2 billion in 2025.
The leading great walls
Juniper Research analysed 20 leading SMS firewall providers, based on criteria including the level of technology innovation and digital investment. The top five leading are Infobip, Mavenir, Mobileum, Proofpoint and Tata Communications.
They all offer advanced analytics within their firewalls using natural language processing and machine learning to combat fraudulent activity, and highlighted that machine learning’s identification and mitigation of fraudulent traffic in real-time is critical to reducing it.
Research co-author Scarlett Woodford noted, “Machine learning is crucial to combatting fraud, as it enables network operators to compete with the constantly evolving tactics of malevolent players.
“SMS firewall vendors must implement machine learning techniques to detect new fraudulent tactics, or they risk losing market share to more technologically-adept vendors.”
North America’s biggest drop
The report predicts North America will have the biggest decline in illegitimate traffic, with volumes decreasing from 178.4 billion in 2020 to 1 billion in 2025.
This is driven by the widespread adoption of firewalls by operators in North America, keen to offset falling voice revenue.
Juniper has a related, free whitepaper: Why Mobile Business Messaging is Critical to Brand Interaction.