Georges Perec removed the letter “e” from an entire book. But by the early 2000s, almost all vowels had disappeared from our messages for more trivial reasons. It was the beginning of the golden age of SMS, which opened up a revolutionary way for teenagers to communicate. No more stammering out an invitation to your crush on the phone: just send a short message with big innuendoes. But SMS requires you to be inventive because its format is restricted – 160 characters.
“Kikoo Tvb? Tu f koi?”, “Jrv!!”… With SMS, a new language is born made of inventive abbreviations and enthusiastic punctuation. In 2024, however, the Short Messages Service has lost its luster. Receiving one from loved ones has become almost as rare as finding a friendly postcard from a corner of paradise in your mailbox. In France, for example, the volume of these messages plummeted from 206 to 110 billion between 2014 and 2022, points out Arcep, the telecoms regulator. This is of course linked to the rise of instant messaging (e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord) which offer richer functions such as images, videos, sending GIFs or group conversations.
However, the SMS has not said its last word. If it was a privileged tool for personal exchange, it has transformed into a lucrative business in recent years. Companies use it, for example, to confirm a reservation to their customers, remind them of an appointment, verify their identity via a code or alert them of a promotion. “SMS is a very powerful communication tool. Everyone with a mobile phone receives them. Conversely, not everyone uses the same instant messaging services,” underlines Alexandre Pébereau, president and founder of Tofane Global, a platform interconnection simplifying exchanges between operators around the world.
The SMS market faces the challenge of fraud
The gap between SMS and messaging remains significant, points out a recent study by Juniper Research. The firm anticipates that there will be 9.3 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide in 2024 – with some people having several – compared to 4.1 billion users of “over the top” communications solutions. [NDLR : qui ne possèdent pas leur propre infrastructure réseau] such as WhatsApp. In 2022, businesses worldwide spent more than $30 billion sending 2.5 trillion commercial SMS messages, reveals a report from Mobilesquared. And the economic intelligence firm specializing in the mobile market estimates that these expenses should exceed $35 billion in 2027.
In France, a recent barometer (Alliance Digitale/af2m) shows that the volume of messages sent by brands increased further by 4.1% in 2023 (13.34 billion sendings) with peaks during key periods such as sales, Black Friday and end-of-year celebrations. At the national level, it is the retail sector that is most fond of it (31% of messages), followed by banks and insurance (21%), services (15%), and e-commerce with deliveries (11%). “Large distribution recorded the strongest growth with + 30%, while the public services and health sector experienced a decline of 40%, representing 6%,” specifies the study.
This lucrative market is, however, facing a major challenge: the rise of various forms of fraud. Every consumer has already encountered one where the scammer tries to lure a customer to a malicious site to steal personal information or encourage them to make a questionable payment. However, other techniques that are painless for the public are also disrupting this market. For example, scammers use malware to artificially trigger the sending of security codes via SMS, thereby boosting the revenue of fraudulent operators with whom they are in cahoots. A ruse that cost a company like Twitter a whopping $60 million a year, revealed Elon Musk after the takeover of the social network.
.