A Secret Success: Why Network APIs Must Kill Their Own Uncertainty
Network APIs work. Almost nobody can prove it, because almost nobody shares the numbers. Andrew Collinson’s CASA26 preview of our Network API research: the market is going better than it looks, moving slower than it should, and the cure is in the industry’s own hands.
Andrew Collinson’s CASA26 preview of CPaaSAA’s Network API research, Signals of Value
Andrew Collinson has been looking at network APIs for about eighteen years. This year, for CPaaSAA, he took six months to look again: interviews with more than eighty people across operators, aggregators, identity players, platforms, regulators and industry bodies, dozens of case studies, and a benchmark of operators and channels. At CASA26, straight after Aoife Condren’s keynote, he gave the room the short version.
Network APIs are a secret success that needs to become a business. It is going better than anyone can easily see. The industry is moving more slowly than it should. And the cure is in the industry’s own hands: kill the causes of market uncertainty.
They work. So why can nobody prove it?
Start with the most important finding. The case studies have one thing in common: they work. Yes, you only get shown the ones that do, but the pattern is unequivocal. They stop fraud, they lift authentication conversion, and quality on demand delivers too, although most of the verifiable numbers for that come from China.
Then the frustration. Ask why market forecasts vary so wildly, or why analysts argue about latency, and the answer is the same: nobody knows, because the people who do know will not say. The sentence Andrew heard most often in six months was some version of “we have numbers, but we can’t share them; we are growing, but I can’t tell you how much.” The identity players appear to be doing much better business than anyone else. Most would not put a number on it.
His challenge to the room was blunt. This is a growth market. Stop behaving like a mature one, sitting on your numbers like a dragon on its gold. Share the successes, and the failures too, because the silence is what is holding the market back.
Sell trust signals, not APIs
Andrew sorted the new APIs into three families: identity and trust signals, location intelligence, and assured connectivity such as quality on demand. Even that took him a long time to work out, and that is part of the problem: the industry paints an enormously complicated picture of the world, cluttered with things it is not selling yet. A buyer who does not understand it gives up.
For the next two to three years, two signals will make the money: number verification and SIM swap. Quality on demand is the one operators love because it is so network-centric, and that is the risk. If this wave does not work, nobody will believe in the next one.
What is the industry really selling? Confidence at scale. A business buys these signals to make its processes work better and to make itself and its customers more confident. Andrew’s recommendation, made without comparing notes with Aoife, matched hers exactly: talk about trust signals. The word API does not need to appear. Buyers today mostly get these signals blended into identity and fraud services, where the signal is an ingredient, not the product, and where something else takes over when the signal is unavailable.
The confidence trap
Andrew’s benchmark found an ecosystem that is not yet mature. Operators, network exposure platforms and multi-network gateways are slightly ahead of the channels, but nobody is yet operating at scale by his demanding definition. Operators are further along technically than commercially: it is still treated as a technology when it needs to be a business. Regulators, he added, are interested rather than alarmed.
Put yourself in the buyer’s seat and the market’s slowness makes sense. What exactly am I buying, when the same capability goes by different names and versions? What will it cost, when published pricing is almost impossible to find? Will it reach my customers, when coverage is hard to check, which matters even more than the fact that it is patchy? Will it behave the same everywhere, when every provider returns something slightly different? And will it still be here in two years, when nobody shows clear commitment?
Every one of those questions leaves the buyer uncertain. Uncertainty causes delay. The buyer who came looking for confidence at scale finds uncertainty, and waits. That is the confidence trap, and the market is sitting right on the edge of it.
Kill the causes of uncertainty
If you forget everything else, Andrew said, remember this. Think like a customer. Stop talking technology. Talk straight about what works and what does not, and show it. Build a business, not a technology, and bring the market with you. Almost all of it is solvable; only operator cultural caution may not be.
He closed by asking the room to picture Mobile World Congress 2027. What should be on stage? Transitions in CAMARA and Open Gateway handled well, a positive story from Aduna, more of the US market on board. And agentic readiness, which will get the attention but is the sizzle, not the sausage.
The technology works. The business case is waiting on the industry’s willingness to say so. The full findings are in our new report, Mobile Network APIs: Signals of Value, free to download from today. Our thanks to Andrew, and to everyone who gave their time to the research.
More from CASA26
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CASA26 ran 21–23 September 2026 at the Tobacco Theater in Amsterdam, hosted by CPaaSAA. This is part of our Thursday series on Trust.
