While others were looking at VR glasses and innovative AI users in Barcelona at MWC26, Mobilesquared were looking at a space which feels rather left behind – messaging. It is so ubiquitous that it is easy to overlook but the reality is that messaging is the perfect way of reaching consumers. Rich messaging holds deep promise, but the lack of progress has been disheartening.
RCS has long-been positioned as the next evolution of business messaging. Ten years ago, the GSMA had ambitions that RCS would be the top business messaging platform by 2019. But the hockey stick growth didn’t materialise and instead we have seen a steady trickle of adoption. It has been hard for RCS to gain any kind of momentum when there are so many stakeholders involved. Operators, aggregators, Google and Apple have all played a part in creating hurdles for RCS adoption.
Barriers to RCS are still very much present. There is no real consensus on commercial models, the onboarding process is onerous, and only in a few markets are operators cooperating with each other to ensure that RCS is presented clearly and coherently to brands.
In contrast, WhatsApp is in a much stronger position. Meta is very clear on the commercial model, when price changes are expected to be announced and how far in advance brands are notified of changes to pricing. Some brands are rightly wary of trusting so much data to Meta, but it is difficult to ignore that Meta deeply understands the needs and wants of advertisers. Meta has also been quick to understand that customer care is a key use case of rich messaging and has positioned WhatsApp as an additional channel for customer care. Onboarding is also much simpler for WhatsApp than RCS, so brands can get started with much less friction.
Conversations with operators suggest that there is widespread opinion that brands will move away from WhatsApp due to concerns about frequent changes in the commercial model, marketing messages not being delivered due to Meta experiments and what Meta will do with the data. But Mobilesquared believes that the first-mover advantage will be a lot for operators to overcome. If brands use WhatsApp to access rich business messaging then it will be difficult to move them back to RCS. After all, why move from a service that is then embedded into your brand and you’ve been able to prove works to an unproven alternative, which requires additional resources to get onboarded and integrate into messaging flows?
This is not to say that RCS will not eventually be successful. Mobilesquared is convinced that eventually RCS will be integral to the business messaging ecosystem in the long term. RCS still has major advantages in that it does not need the consumer to download a third-party app. And operators are trusted by brands more than Meta is. RCS might be the tortoise in the race, and but it will get to the finishing line even if it doesn’t become the primary business messaging channel at the end. The issue in the meantime is that the majority of traffic migrating from SMS is going onto WhatsApp, and that is lost from the telco world forever.
