The global COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the development and adoption of online digital services, including mobile user authentication services. This led to more Fintech solutions growth at a rapid rate from 2020 to 2022, as companies started to adopt one-touch verification.
These services enable CIOs and CTOs to increase the level of security offered to customers who are concerned about online financial transactions. However, there are numerous other industry use cases that require increased security measures to protect sensitive data.
According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, mobile network operators will generate $27 billion from the termination of Short Message Service (SMS) related to multi-factor authentication in 2022 -- that's an increase from $25 billion in 2021.
Commercial SMS Apps Market Development
Juniper analysts predict this 5 percent growth will be driven by increased pressure on digital service providers to offer highly secure user authentication that reduces the risk of data breaches and protects user identity.
Multi-factor authentication combines two or more credentials to verify a user or a transaction. This includes sending an SMS message that contains a one‑time password or code to a user's unique mobile phone number.
Juniper also urges mobile network operators to capitalize on the growth in demand for multi-factor authentication SMS traffic, by leveraging firewalls to monitor and identify SMS traffic specifically used for multi-factor authentication.
In turn, savvy mobile network service providers will then be able to charge a premium on this SMS traffic and further increase their business-oriented messaging revenue.
The study findings uncovered that there will be over 1.7 trillion multi-factor authentication messages delivered globally in 2022 -- that's representing 60 percent of the total SMS business messaging traffic.
According to the Juniper assessment, mobile network operators must develop machine learning algorithms that automate the monitoring of this vast amount of traffic to efficiently identify messages that can be charged at a premium.
"Automating traffic detection is crucial for operators as we expect multi-factor authentication traffic to grow to 2.1 billion messages by 2027. SMEs have typically not invested in messaging for security in the past," said Keith Breed, industry analyst at Juniper Research.
However, rising pressure to implement greater security for users will drive adoption amongst small and medium enterprises (SMEs) over the next 5 years, and potentially increase global SMS traffic.
Outlook for Multi-Factor Authentication SMS Growth
To manage this increase in demand for multi-factor authentication SMS messages, Juniper urges mobile network operators to partner with Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) platforms.
These platforms offer the necessary user interface to SMEs to manage authentication processes and subsequent traffic from which operators will attain additional new SMS business messaging revenue.
That said, I believe the speed of adoption also increased for Automated Virtual Assistants. Artificial intelligence can extract information from voice calls to create a series of instructions that answer customer questions more quickly and efficiently. This capability will surely drive new growth.