Regional snapshot

Trends

RCS adoption takes off

RCS volumes have grown exponentially in North America over the past two years with a 14x increase in 2024 alone.  We are seeing carriers in the region taking a “Drink your own champagne” approach and starting to run RCS campaigns to their own subscribers. With no dominant OTT messaging app in North America, the channel has the potential to be transformational in the market.

Omnichannel trends

We are also seeing further strong growth in channels that support conversational customer experiences, including WhatsApp (258%) and Mobile App Messaging (247%). 

Particularly strong growth for Voice and Video indicates that there is still a significant appetite for person-to-person interactions, with brands incorporating these channels into their omnichannel strategies, albeit with more convenient and efficient entry points. We predict even stronger growth for these channels as Meta releases WhatsApp Business Calling to more markets later this year. 

Network APIs realizing potential

Although still in the early stages of adoption, network APIs are starting to be used to support an array of revenue generating use cases for telcos by exposing network capabilities to developers to build innovative applications for everything from authentication to number checks and location verification.

Infobip is closely involved with this process in North America, acting as a partner platform for carriers rolling out use cases.

Changing shopping trends affecting messaging

Our analysis of interactions before, during, and after the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale season show a shift from one-way blast promotions to more sophisticated conversational interactions between brands and consumers over a more protracted period.

We saw a significant increase in SMS, WhatsApp, email and RCS messages but interestingly, the data showed more notable increases in interactions on Saturday 30th November, and Sunday 1st December, revealing that businesses are now looking to keep the conversation with customers going beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone.

Trends

Rich messaging channels take off

The major trend that we are seeing in Europe is the increased adoption of rich messaging channels like WhatsApp and RCS in Western Europe and Viber in Eastern markets like Croatia and Ukraine. Retail & eCommerce has been the industry pushing the highest volumes as conversational commerce and support use cases are rolled out. 

Italy, France, Spain and the United Kingdom have all seen significant uplifts in both messaging app traffic and Voice and Video, indicating that more brands are expanding their stable of channels and looking to achieve a balanced mix for both transactional and promotional use cases.  

Evolving regulations to combat SMS fraud

There have been important developments in Europe aimed at combating SMS fraud like phishing, smishing and the artificial inflation of traffic, which has significantly impacted both telcos and consumers in recent years.

While effective fraud prevention technologies are available, their implementation is constrained by heavy privacy regulations affecting tools such as firewalls and AI-driven message scanning.

Infobip is actively collaborating with telcos and regulatory bodies to refine these regulations and ensure enhanced security and privacy protection for all stakeholders (both end-users, and telcos). 

Trends

LATAM is a vast market with a diversity of countries, cultures, and economic development.

From a messaging perspective, Brazil, México and Argentina were the most active countries.

Argentina: A new president and sustained economic recovery have led to renewed optimism and increase in messaging traffic across all verticals, with the biggest increases being in Technology and Software (117%) and Transportation & Logistics (69%). 

Brazil: Although there has been growth in traffic across all industries, the impressive overall growth is primarily down to the Media and Entertainment (14x) and Telecoms (76%) industries. 

As one of the regions where WhatsApp Payments is supported, we have also seen a significant increase in adoption and interest from Infobip customers in the region.

With high levels of carrier support for RCS in many LATAM countries, there has been a surge in RCS traffic, particularly after September 2024 when Apple started supporting it with the release of iOS 18. 

Trends

APAC is a vast market with a high diversity of countries, cultures, and economic development. With a 51% increase in messages sent via our platform in 2024, the region leads the world in terms of conversational messaging growth. Here we look at some of the trends driving these extraordinary increases.  

We are seeing significant RCS adoption in several countries, with the growth in volumes most evident in the Philippines (98%) with India and Singapore also showing strong increases. Demand for RCS is primarily coming from brands that want to leverage the rich media capabilities of the channel for their promotional traffic to work alongside SMS. There is no sign of RCS replacing SMS in any markets, rather being used to complement it to improve the overall customer experience.   

Our regional experts predict significant growth in 2025 in the region as network glitches are ironed out and more brands adopt RCS.  

Localization is key in APAC, where customers consistently respond better to culturally relevant and language-specific messaging. 

In the Philippines, 85% of consumers preferred messages in their native language, and personalized messaging saw an 18% higher click-through rate during Black Friday promotions. 

For example, a global electronics brand localized their Black Friday SMS campaigns in the Tagalog language and offered free shipping on selected items. This approach led to a 30% increase in sales compared to similar non-localized campaigns. 

We are also seeing Western sales promotions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday gain traction in APAC and other Eastern markets, but with local retailers putting a local spin on the event to improve success. 

We have previously reported on the problem that phishing scams are causing across the region. Singapore is one country that is tackling this head on with new legislation. The Shared Responsibility Framework (SRF) came into effect on 16 December 2024. It ensures that losses from phishing scams are shared between victims, financial institutions, and telcos if these entities fail to meet specified responsibilities. 

This has led to a number of changes that impact business messaging in the country: 

• Banks have ceased including clickable links in emails and SMS messages sent to retail customers. 
• The regulatory body Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has mandated that non-registered SMS sender IDs be labeled as “Likely-SCAM” to alert customers and mitigate fraudulent activities. 
• The government is also reviewing its use of SMS and clickable links to prevent scams.  

Trends

Local brands benefiting from Meta test market status

With 500 million+ WhatsApp users, India is a market where Meta loves to trial its new features and products. Local brands have been taking advantage by being early adopters of WhatsApp Payments, WhatsApp Flows, and WhatsApp Business Calling. 

• WhatsApp Payments: We have seen significant interest from customers in India looking to adopt WhatsApp Payments. An early adopter that we have worked with has been Tata AIA. The insurance provider uses the solution to enable consumers to make payment for renewal of Tata AIA products on the WhatsApp platform. 
• WhatsApp Flows: This innovative feature enables businesses to create structured, interactive customer journeys that guide users through various touchpoints using WhatsApp. Apollo 24/7 is a leading healthcare platform in India that was an early adopter of the feature to help make booking diagnostic tests convenient and quick. Patients can use WhatsApp to browse and select tests at times that suit them. 
• WhatsApp Business Calling: WhatsApp Business Calling API is a new beta feature from Meta that enables organizations using the WhatsApp Business Platform for their customer messaging to add voice calling to the user experience, enabling people to call the business whenever they need to, just like they would with friends and family. With India being one of the key countries where the beta is supported, we are working with a number of brands to implement the technology.  

There have been updates regarding clickable links in SMS messages in India.  

Under the new regulations, any clickable links in SMS messages, such as URLs, short links, or CTAs (Call-to-Action links), must now be whitelisted on the DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) platform. 

If a message contains a link that has not been whitelisted, it will fail the DLT scrubbing process and will not be delivered to the recipient. 

Example: If your SMS includes a link like: https://www.xyz.com/, you must whitelist it in advance on the DLT platform. Without this, the message will not pass regulatory checks and will fail delivery. 

Trends

With evolving privacy and data protection laws in the region there is now a requirement for the data of local subscribers to be stored and processed within specific geographic boundaries.

To help our customers to meet these requirements, we opened our first data center in KSA during 2024. The data center in Riyadh enables us to support the communication and digital transformation requirements of regional businesses by hosting and processing data within the country.

In Jordan, Pakistan, U.A.E, Qatar, and KSA we are seeing telcos (which in many cases are under government ownership) partnering with vendors like us to expand their offering from traditional telco channels, towards a wider CPaaS offering that includes OTTs, email, and digital channels.

Through partnerships they also gain access to international A2P SMS deliverability, which enables them to serve an increasingly globally mobile customer base.

Even though Pakistan saw some of the most significant growth in WhatsApp messages in 2024, the popularity of the app as a B2C channel is under threat due to slow internet speeds in the country prompting WhatsApp to move its Content Delivery Network (CDN) abroad, causing some service disruptions for local users. 

Despite the relocation, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has reported improvements in internet services across the country. Fixed-line internet services have been upgraded by two tiers, although the country still ranks only 139^th in the world for fixed-line internet speed.   

Internet speed is no problem in the UAE which tops the world rankings for the fastest average download speed of 453.87 Mbps and upload speed of 32.69 Mbps. This may explain the popularity of VoIP, video and social media messaging in the country. 

Similarly Saudi Arabia has no problems with mobile internet speed and has seen a 5x increase in Voice and Video messaging. 

As 5G rollout continues in the region, telcos are actively looking to monetize this network with many working on developing APIs in accordance with the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, which is a framework of common network APIs designed to provide universal access to operator networks for developers.

We are helping multiple carriers in the region with their go-to-market strategies based on our global experience. 

With regards to the industries driving messaging volumes, it is Finance & Fintech that continue to impress with 3x growth in the UAE and 145% in Pakistan.

This mirrors the double-digit annual growth forecast for the Islamic banking industry, which is known for fast adoption of financial technology. The industry is projected to reach $6.7 trillion in assets by 2027, driven partly by this appetite for digital innovation, which includes AI adoption and advanced messaging use cases. 

Trends

RCS availability and challenges   

RCS is currently only supported in South Africa and Nigeria where carriers are starting to see the potential and have begun driving adoption. One limiting factor is that RCS’s reliance on mobile data will hamper adoption in regions where prepaid data plans dominate.   

There’s a growing demand for solutions that enable customer behavioral management and insights. Solutions like People CDP and Moments are gaining traction, particularly in the BFSI sector. Some of our BFSI customers are enriching their customer data strategies, moving beyond just credit bureau information to create more comprehensive profiles.   

AI is gaining momentum in key markets across Africa, though its use cases are primarily focused on customer acquisition and service enhancement. These efforts aim to boost productivity and improve resource utilization. Service-based industries are adopting AI at a faster pace compared to growth-oriented sectors.   

Conversational experience, especially in banking, is currently focused on servicing and non-transactional interactions. The need for regulatory alignment across several markets has meant that the trend has been slow to pick up momentum, although we are seeing this change as the industry begins to recognize the benefits. 

SMS remains key in the African region. However, we are seeing increasing demand for USSD and other more cost-effective options. There is a worrying trend for MNO’s to increase revenue by raising prices to international levels where they categorize brands as international organizations.