We didn’t put out a Telemedia newsletter in August – apparently, the industry took that as a challenge. While many of us were trying to remember what an out-of-office reply was for, the market spent the month quietly rearranging itself.
Payments fragmented further; AI agents started moving from recommendation to transaction; RCS began looking less like “next-generation SMS” and more like a trusted commerce channel; fraud management became more intelligent; eSIM continued to prise the mobile customer relationship away from mobile operators; and operators themselves pushed deeper into payments, financial services and other digital utilities.
At first glance these are separate stories. They aren’t. Taken together, they point to a growing and profound shift in telemedia: the old value chain is becoming a stack of interoperable capabilities and growth increasingly depends on how intelligently you connect them.
Payments pivots
Nowhere is that clearer than in payments. Nuvei’s new European research found that 27% of consumers are likely to abandon a purchase if their preferred way to pay is missing. That is not merely a checkout optimisation issue, it tells us that payment choice has become part of the proposition itself. Europe may be converging infrastructurally through SEPA, instant payments and Open Banking, but consumers remain stubbornly local in how they want to pay.
The gaming sector makes the same point in harder financial terms. Appcharge’s analysis found that routing an otherwise identical payment through a local rather than cross-border acquirer can improve approval rates by 8.4 percentage points. In Brazil, Pix users also become markedly more valuable over repeat purchases than card and wallet users.
So, the payments argument is no longer cards versus DCB versus wallets versus A2A. The winning answer is increasingly “all of the above, intelligently orchestrated”. The right rail depends on the market, user, transaction, risk and even where that customer is in their lifecycle.
That matters even more because the customer may soon not be the one pressing “buy”. Visa’s work with OpenAI and Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines both assume AI agents will initiate transactions on our behalf. Juniper Research, meanwhile, expects agentic commerce transactions to grow from around 620 million this year to 120 billion annually by 2031.
For telemedia, this is not an abstract AI story. It could reopen the economics of micropayments. Agents buying data, identity checks, connectivity, messaging, content or API access by the query, message or second look rather like the kind of tiny digital transactions this industry has spent 25 years learning how to monetise.
Trust tops the agenda
But autonomy magnifies another August theme: trust. MCP Insight will arrive at Telemedia in Marbella next month showing the next iteration of SHIELD, which now analyses more than 150 million customer journeys every day and is adding AI-assisted investigation and clearer evidence around fraud decisions. Subex’s new three-year fraud-management deal with an African MNO makes the same point from another angle: mobile money, digital services and more complex journeys require fraud systems that understand context, not merely anomalies.
The FCA’s changing expectations of PSPs push in the same direction. Compliance, safeguarding, resilience and financial-crime controls are no longer back-office credentials; they are part of the commercial proposition. If payments, agents and mobile services are going to become more automated and more distributed, then identity, explainability and trust have to become more embedded.
We can see that same shift in messaging. RCS for Business is forecast to grow from 125 billion messages this year to 485 billion by 2030, driven in part by banks, retailers and healthcare providers moving authentication, alerts and marketing away from SMS. The richness matters, but verification may matter more. In a world awash with spoofing, synthetic identities and AI-generated everything, knowing that a message really came from the bank suddenly has tangible commercial value.
Changing shape of what telemedia actually is
There is also a fascinating reshuffling of who does what. Banglalink has secured a PSP licence in Bangladesh and is preparing to launch Mukto Pay. Airtel Money in Uganda and Orange Money in Jordan are helping turn mobile platforms into insurance distribution channels. In the other direction, Lidl, AO, Starling and others show how eSIM and MVNOenablement are allowing retailers and banks to sell connectivity without becoming conventional network operators. Bayobab and Telna are doing similar work to accelerate branded travel eSIM services across Africa.
Meanwhile, second-number apps are turning what used to require business telephony infrastructure into software on a smartphone, complete with AI call handling, routing and global numbers.
The boundaries between telco, payments provider, bank, insurer, software platform and retailer are not disappearing entirely, but they are becoming much more porous. Connectivity is becoming a capability. Payments are becoming a capability. Identity, messaging, risk and content are capabilities. The commercial opportunity lies in recombining them around a customer need.
There is a warning hidden in this expansion, however. The customer relationship has to be earned. New research showing that only 22% of parents tend to trust mobile networks with their children’s online safety is a useful reminder that operators cannot simply declare themselves trusted digital gatekeepers because they own the connection. As telcos move further into payments, identity, safety and digital services, trust increasingly becomes something they have to demonstrate.
Even content fits this picture. Robert Schmiedl’s argument that users don’t need 2,000 games, they need enough genuinely good ones to keep coming back, is really an argument for optimisation over abundance. Acquisition matters, but retention, relevance and repeat engagement matter more.
Which brings us neatly to Marbella
The Telemedia Marbella conference programme for 5-6 October runs from Traffic to Journeys to Payments to Intelligence to Content, Engagement and Growth. That sequence is more than neat conference programming. It is pretty much what August’s news has been telling us.
Traffic quality now matters more than raw volume. Chrome and device changes can break journeys before payment is ever reached. Payments need multiple rails and smarter routing. Fraud and identity need an intelligence layer. Subscriptions need better lifecycle management. Content needs to retain rather than merely exist. Regional markets need local strategies rather than global templates.
Telemedia has always brought together businesses that sit at awkward intersections: operators and merchants, billing and content, messaging and marketing, technology and regulation. Those intersections are now becoming the market.
So perhaps the theme heading into Marbella is not disruption, despite there being plenty of it. It is recombination.
The winners in 2027 won’t necessarily be those with the biggest content library, cheapest traffic, cleverest AI model or widest payment footprint. They will be the companies that can connect acquisition, identity, payment, risk, content and engagement into a journey that works for the right user, in the right market, at the right moment.
Which, conveniently, gives us rather a lot to talk about in Marbella. So register here and see you there.
