Removing the Risk That Could Impede Adoption of Rich Business Messaging

Removing the Risk That Could Impede Adoption of Rich Business Messaging

Verification and Trust Required for Rising New Service to Reach its Full Potential

• What’s the News: The rise of Rich Business Messaging, driven by the increasing availability of handsets supporting GSMA Rich Communication Services, opens the door to new forms of fraud and spam, putting users at risk.
• Why it Matters: Rich Business Messaging is poised to be the next wave of messaging technology offering enhanced features like read receipts, video, group chat and payment options. Service providers and businesses must work to ensure that the chatbots and conversations can be trusted, or the full potential of Rich Business Messaging will not be realized.

• Who’s it for: All involved in the Rich Communication Service and Rich Business Messaging ecosystem, service providers, A2P messaging providers, enterprises and marketers.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. – March 24, 2020 – Rich Business Messaging, powered by Rich Communication Services (RCS), is poised to be the new wave of messaging technology offering enhanced features like read receipts, video, group chat and paying for services. For it to live up to its potential, service providers and businesses must provide consumers with the information they need to verify the authenticity of Rich Business Messaging chatbots and the conversations they represent.

Some 100 service providers worldwide have already launched RCS, and that number continues to grow each quarter, according to the GSMA. Google has made RCS the primary messaging platform for Android, which is used by 87 percent of the world’s smartphones, according to IDC.

Rich Business Messaging will be an open ecosystem, and it is expected that huge volumes of business chatbots will be active on service provider networks at any given time. This makes it critical that the communications industry ensures that systems are in place to validate the identity of each business. Without that capability, it is likely that fraudsters will seize the opportunity to dupe consumers by posing as legitimate businesses.

“RCS has the potential to significantly elevate business-to-consumer engagement by establishing a solid foundation for Rich Business Messaging,” said Richard Jacowleff, CEO and President, iconectiv. “It is essential to get the chatbot onboarding right, ensuring robust authentication and building a strong trust factor with consumers to ensure the reach and effectiveness of Rich Business Messaging is not undercut.”

Learning from the rampant illegal robocalling and robotexting, iconectiv has released a market brief to help businesses and service providers. The brief explains how the early incorporation of a verification/authentication capability will ensure that Rich Business Messaging is a trusted service, as well as iconectiv’s role in the Rich Communication Services ecosystem and the company’s involvement in the GSMA’s Verified Sender initiative. This helps to establish trust in business-to-consumer (B2C) messaging by providing a framework that verifies the business sender and chatbot identities.

In a 2019 Vodafone trial, 80 percent of customers read an RCS message, and 25 percent responded to the offer. Other service providers report comparable results, according to the GSMA, which reported that application-to-person (A2P) use cases have been especially successful, with open rates of 85 percent plus.” 

iconectiv’s TruReach Intel provides Verification Authority services as well as a variety of additional tools to help the rich business messaging ecosystem manage trust at scale. It is a neutral and secure service that helps distinguish those rich business messages that are coming from verified senders from those that are not. TruReach Intel supports voice, text and data making it a comprehensive solution for omni-channel trust for customer engagement.

To learn more about how incorporating a verification/authentication capability will ensure that Rich Business Messaging is a trusted service download achieving trusted consumer engagement here.