Maximise Engagement, Attack Fraud and Friction: The CASA25 Analysts’ Take
At CASA25, the “State of CPaaS 2025” panel—moderated by Andrew Collinson—brought together four of the industry’s most experienced analysts and strategists: Nick Lane (MobileSquared), Amy Cameron (STL Partners), Raúl Castañon (S&P Global Market Intelligence), and Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey).
Rather than debating forecasts, the group aligned on something more important: Intelligent Engagement as the right framework for the next chapter of CPaaS evolution. They endorsed the core recommendations of the State of CPaaS report and added their own perspectives on how to drive growth—by improving trust, eliminating friction, and creating real business outcomes.
🧠 Shared Support for “Intelligent Engagement”
The panel broadly supported the idea that CPaaS, Network APIs, vCons, AI, and even CCaaS are no longer separate markets, but interdependent components of a single, evolving ecosystem.
This idea—Intelligent Engagement—shifts the focus from technology layers to business value:
- Using intelligence and data to create context-aware, proactive engagement
- Balancing automation with trust and consent
- Building an ecosystem where communication, identity, and AI reinforce each other
As Andrew put it, “It’s not about 80 or 100 billion—it’s about how these capabilities go together, and what value they unlock.”
🧩 The Analysts’ Recommendations
Each analyst offered practical advice on how telcos and CPaaS players can accelerate Intelligent Engagement, reduce friction, and rebuild trust.
Nick Lane (MobileSquared)
- Educate brands and consumers about richer, two-way communication.
- Help enterprises move beyond one-way alerts to conversational engagement.
- Tackle the trust deficit in business messaging by improving quality and verification.
- Learn from mobile advertising, where user engagement and ARPU are much higher.
Raúl Castañon (S&P Global)
- Focus on user experience, not just security: “Reduce friction first, revenue will follow.”
- Recognize that the success path is already proven—aggregation, developer ecosystems, and enterprise co-creation.
- Telcos need to close the execution gap, not wait for perfect conditions.
Amy Cameron (STL Partners)
- Prioritize anti-fraud and identity APIs—they solve a real enterprise pain point.
- Develop location and IoT-related APIs that can scale without full market coordination.
- Push toward 5G Standalone, since network monetization depends on it.
- Look at AI and automation as critical to operationalizing API use cases.
Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey)
- Trust must become the foundation: consumers no longer trust anonymous channels.
- Fix inflated or fraudulent traffic—clean up CPaaS to be the trusted layer of digital interaction.
- Recognize that the opportunity isn’t in technology alone, but in becoming the trusted broker that connects enterprises and customers safely and intelligently.
🧭 Different Perspectives, Shared Direction
While their expertise comes from different vantage points—Nick from messaging, Amy and Ferry from telco APIs, Raúl from a vendor-revenue base—they converged on one point:
The definitions may differ, but the direction is clear.
All agreed that fragmentation, slow API rollout, and poor communication of value are holding the market back. The path forward is not to obsess over individual segments or metrics, but to synchronize innovation across the ecosystem.
🔁 From Forecasts to Outcomes
Andrew closed the session with a reminder:
“We need to stop talking in acronyms, and start talking about outcomes.”
The real opportunity is not whether the market reaches $30B, $80B, or $100B—but how fast we can:
- Deploy APIs and services that solve real business problems
- Build trust into every interaction
- Reduce friction in communication and onboarding
- And align as an industry around Intelligent Engagement
🔚 Final Word: Trust as the New Growth Engine
Every forecast, every strategy, every API ultimately leads back to one thing: trust.
Consumers ignore messages they don’t trust. Enterprises hesitate to adopt what they can’t control. Developers disengage from complexity and inconsistency.
If the industry can make Intelligent Engagement synonymous with trusted, value-driven communication, growth will follow naturally.
Because in the end, Intelligent Engagement isn’t just a framework—it’s a mindset.
A call to work together, connect the layers, and make digital interaction smarter, safer, and more human.
→ Read the full State of CPaaS 2025 report to explore how CPaaS, Network APIs, vCons, and AI converge into Intelligent Engagement—and what the industry must do next to accelerate it.
Can CPaaS (and its adjacent technologies) grow to $100 billion or more?
The discussion was data-driven, often dense—and more importantly, deeply revealing. Because behind the market forecasts and API adoption charts lay a bigger truth:
The real opportunity isn’t in any one forecast—it’s in how we work together to unlock business value across the ecosystem.
📊 Where’s the Money? Mixed Forecasts, But Closer Than They Seem
Each panelist arrived with a different model and number. At first glance, they seemed miles apart. But dig into the definitions, and the picture gets clearer.
- Nick Lane (MobileSquared) focused on business messaging, especially SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS. Nick recently cut his CPaaS forecast for 2029 due to Meta’s new WhatsApp pricing. He now expects ~$11B rather than $19B by 2029, highlighting how sensitive messaging revenue is to platform moves.
- Amy Cameron (STL Partners) projected ~$31B in Network API revenue by 2030, but emphasized that STL uses a bottom-up use case model, estimating demand across fraud prevention, connected vehicles, predictive networking, and more. STL’s model includes APIs beyond the current Open Gateway set and even future capabilities like predictive network performance.
- Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey), often cited for the famous $100–$300B figure, clarified that the “core” Network API revenue is around $30B—but McKinsey adds in enablement revenue (e.g., edge compute) and telco-delivered solutions built on top of APIs to reach their broader total. His perspective focuses on what telcos could earn if they build full-stack, API-enabled enterprise services.
- Raúl Castañon (S&P Global) brought the grounded reality check, using a bottom-up approach based on observable revenue from today’s CPaaS providers like Twilio, Infobip, Sinch, etc. He agreed the potential is there, but emphasized that the key enablers still need to be delivered—especially real services, go-to-market skills, and trust.
🧭 A Word on Definitions: When “CPaaS” Means Different Things to Different Experts
One of the most important takeaways wasn’t in the charts—it was in the disconnect.
Each analyst defines CPaaS differently.
Nick focuses on messaging-centric CPaaS, anchored in the realities of commercial traffic volumes and pricing models. Amy is focused on telco platform potential and how mobile networks evolve to support new use cases. Ferry looks at the network API economy, and how telcos can monetize their infrastructure in an API-first world. Raúl focuses on actual financial performance, rooted in existing vendor results.
No wonder the numbers vary so widely. It’s not disagreement—it’s different slices of an evolving puzzle.
If anything, this diversity shows that the industry urgently needs a shared framing—a bigger umbrella that can encompass the shifting tech stack and unify business strategy.
💡 Intelligent Engagement: A New Umbrella for a Fragmented Industry
That’s where the concept of Intelligent Engagement comes in.
Intelligent Engagement reframes the market not in terms of CPaaS vs. APIs vs. AI vs. CCaaS—but as a connected continuum:
CPaaS remains a foundation for programmable communication. Network APIs bring context and capability from the network layer. AI and vCons make interactions more autonomous and personalized. CCaaS, where it aligns, becomes the operational layer for engagement.
This is no longer about technology layers in isolation. It’s about:
- Reducing friction
- Adding trust
- Creating meaningful business outcomes for brands, platforms, and end users.
✅ Analyst Recommendations: How to Unlock the Value
The panel closed with each expert offering actionable advice—not on how to predict the future, but how to shape it. Their top priorities:
🧠 Nick Lane (MobileSquared)
- Educate brands and consumers on two-way communication
- Help businesses move from alert-style messaging to real engagement
- Recognize that trust and relevance are key to consumer responses
- Learn from mobile advertising—where ARPU is 10x higher than messaging
🧠 Raúl Castañon (S&P Global)
- Focus on frictionless user experiences, especially for authentication
- Study how early CPaaS players scaled—aggregators, developer tools, use cases
- Telcos must stop saying “we don’t have the skills”—and start finding partners who do
🧠 Amy Cameron (STL Partners)
- Prioritize anti-fraud and identity APIs now—they’re real, needed, and monetizable
- Explore location and IoT-related APIs with direct enterprise relevance
- Push for 5G Standalone adoption—it’s the gateway to future network monetization
🧠 Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey)
- Focus on building trust—CPaaS and messaging have a spam problem
- Become a trusted channel consumers can rely on
- Deliver the right message, at the right time, in the right way—even silently
- Clean up inflated traffic and make RCS or future channels truly trustworthy
🔁 It’s Not About the Forecast. It’s About Working Together.
The final message from Andrew Collinson summed it up best:
“We need to stop talking in acronyms, and start talking about outcomes.”
The truth is, the difference between $30B and $100B is not a number—it’s a mindset.
The market will not grow because of forecasts. It will grow because:
- Telcos move faster
- APIs become productized
- Trust becomes the foundation
- We stop duplicating effort and start aligning strategies
And most importantly: we tell a better story. A story not about APIs or messaging formats, but about Intelligent Engagement—the outcome every enterprise is chasing.
🔚 Final Word: Trust Is the Starting Point
If there was one thread running through every analyst’s comment, it was trust. Consumers don’t trust anonymous messages. Enterprises don’t trust vendor lock-in. Developers don’t trust empty promises.
Becoming a trusted broker of intelligent engagement—for identity, communications, and AI interactions—is where the real long-term value lies.
That’s the real opportunity for telcos, platforms, and innovators. Not to chase forecasts, but to lead the next era of engagement by building smarter, safer, and more connected digital experiences.
To dive deeper, download the full State of CPaaS 2025 Report and explore how CPaaS, AI, Network APIs, and more are converging into the era of Intelligent Engagement.
