Rich Communication Services (RCS) business messaging traffic will reach 50 billion messages globally in 2025– Apple’s first full year of support for the technology. This represents a single-year growth from 33 billion in 2024.
However, operators must partner with RCS business messaging (RBM) service providers which work with enterprises to create viable RBM ecosystems enabling large-scale growth of business messaging traffic.
The latest study from Juniper Research predicts that, in doing so, operators will best position their solutions for accelerated growth in RBM traffic in 2026 and beyond.
To achieve this growth, the study urges operators to prioritise onboarding their RCS services to Google’s Jibe platform in 2025, for increased network interoperability and the reduced investment required to launch services. However, it anticipates a slow onboarding process will delay global RBM traffic growth in 2025.
An extract from the new report, Global RCS Business Messaging Market 2024-2029, is now available as a free download.
Barriers to growth in 2025…
Despite the launch of RCS messaging on iOS devices, overcoming the key barrier to
enterprise adoption, other challenges remain to ensure the channel’s success.
Operators must act quickly to monetise RCS business messaging effectively. The way
operators work with aggregators to deploy RCS and monitor business messaging
traffic will be critical to the channel’s success over the next five years.
One of the other challenges facing RCS is competition from OTT (Over-the-Top)
messaging platforms. In several countries, OTT messaging apps have a strong
penetration, with a high proportion of the population actively using these apps to
send P2P messages. In these countries, messaging vendors must focus on offering
RCS as part of an omnichannel approach.
There are also issues regarding fraud. Fraud has had a significant impact on SMS; however, the architecture of the RCS channel is different, and new types of fraud are expected to
emerge as a result. It is essential that the RCS messaging ecosystem remains vigilant
to emerging types of fraud across RCS and is able to respond quickly.
Otherwise, this will have a significant impact on the growth of the channel over the next five years. RCS messages that Google provides are sent and received online through Google’s backend, thus Google collects the necessary data for CDRs (Call Detail Records).
Google then sends operators a CDR feed every 24 hours, thereby impacting the level
of visibility operators have of traffic flows and meaning that operators cannot
respond quickly to instances of fraud.
… but traffic to accelerate in 2026
The study found that RBM will have a significant opportunity for growth in 2026, owing to increased operator support. Apple is also expected to expand RBM capabilities to more countries throughout 2025; driving further growth in 2026. In turn, the report forecast that global RBM traffic will reach 200 billion messages by 2029.
Research Author Molly Gatford explains: “Accelerating growth of RBM in 2026 will also require operators to offer basic RCS messages at the same price as SMS. This will support enterprises’ transition from SMS to RBM for transactional messaging, increasing familiarity with the channel to drive future growth.”
