By Chinenye Anuforo
The board and management of Infobip West Africa has said its ever-growing innovation, Rich Communication Service (RCS), will bring extra income to commercial banks and can provide a solution for mobile network operators (MNOs) to compete with over-the-top (OTT) players and regain some of the revenue they have been missing out on in both the P2P and the lucrative application-to-person (A2P) messaging space.
The company stated this to newsmen during a roundtable event tagged “Leveraging RCS as the next big digital channel in Nigeria – the potential and challenges in Lagos,” on Thursday.
At the event, the senior operator and partnership manager at Infobip West Africa, Martin Effiong, noted that, while the efficacy of SMS is dwindling, its innovation, RCS, represents the evolution of SMS and incorporates as mobile apps are still yet to drive the desired engagement.
He noted that the digital channel user base is growing continuously compared to traditional channels while adding that telecom companies have a unique opportunity to drive awareness and adoption of RCS.
According to him, “Over-the-top platforms such as WhatsApp, Viber and Telegram are gaining popularity, which is resulting in SMS messaging losing relevance as a person-to-person communication channel. This leaves MNOs with few means to compete in this segment OTT channels are becoming dominant in the enterprise communication space due to their prevalence, rich media capabilities, and large-scale P2P adoption”.
Effiong said, “RCS can provide a solution for MNOs to compete with OTT players and regain some of the revenue they have been missing out on in both the P2P and the lucrative Application-To-Person (A2P) messaging space.
“We, the creators of RCS, understand what it is to encroach on people’s privacy by spamming and so we have put in place some requirements that whoever is sending promotional messages are valid businesses. We also understand the need for businesses to target known customers because RCS messages are being paid for. However when you talk about regulation in Nigeria for RCS and DND, this is still in formative stages with the regulator. These are all things as regards stakeholder engagement we have with the NCC and see if they can improve on the gaps to protect consumers from spamming”.
Corroborating him, the Regional Manager at Infobip West Africa, Olutayo Ladipo-Ajai, said, “So what RCS is bringing to the table is an extra arm of income for these banks because as much they are into customer engagement, they are also able to leverage customers that will want to opt in for an additional service like transaction receipts for instance. RCS is a bit more pricier than SMS because of the value it brings”.
For his part, Customer Success Manager at the company, Isaac Akanni, said, bank customers are currently expecting banks to be where they want them to be.
He said, “We think that SMS has gone beyond just text and has evolved to images, videos and so on and the name of that evolution is RCS which is gaining momentum in Nigeria. The idea is pretty simple, if you do not move, then you will left behind”
We are processing two-third of messages globally and in 2022, we processed over 400 billion messages. Put that in context of a population of 8 billion people, then the number soars. This tells you that we are the world’s largest aggregator of communication and customer engagement and so the whole idea is that we encourage communication within businesses and people”.