A subtitle for this session could be Flat Rate Continuous Authentication, but more on that later.

IPification was launched in 2017. Missing the initial bubble-burst cycle of mobile connect.

I realized that we’ve been discussing MobileConnect at TADSummit since 2014. With a presentation from George Held, VP Commerce, Etisalat Group and Frans De Rooij, Strategic Product Manager, Ericsson presented on the case for identities. George gave a presentation that demonstrated the value of Etisalat’s Authentication service. 10 years later, I’m talking with Stefan, after a long learning period in the industry, and the emergence of MobileConnect as a maturing option for Identity Verification.

The web now presents a range of solutions, as covered by Dan Jenkins at TADSummit in 2023. Passkeys, FIDO2, WebAuthn… What does it all mean? Here are the Video, and Slides.

I found the discussion with Stefan fun and frank. Mobile Connect has been a long journey. With the current complicating factor of the GSMA Open Gateway, and its, in my opinion, miss focus on APIs and adding another layer when there is little remaining delay budget.

Can we all agree enterprises want solutions that work with their business (both technical and commercial) NOT APIs. I’ve been making that point for over one decade. I’ve become resigned to telecoms not listening on that point. Fortunately, the Web gets it. I’ll stop adding my opinions, rather focus on IPification, as they get it and are delivering the solutions enterprises want.

IPification began with password fatigue, and the rise of phone numbers as identifiers. It was convenient for customers, but led to the SMS fraud issues plaguing the industry. IPification focused on customer authentication, and the strong SIM authentication available within mobile networks. They are deployed in 50 carriers, and focus on making mobile authentication easy for enterprises.

One of IPification’s core principles is delivering solutions to enterprises, NOT APIs. Paraphrasing Stefan, most business do not want to integrate APIs, they want solutions to their business problems. Where packaging is critical.

Combining with actionable analytics such as showing the full authentication funnel, so the business can see where authentication failing and why? As an example doing IP to MSISDN matching, which can fail because of dual SIM devices. A simple update to the user experience can avoid such potential failure points. Moving IPification to a partner role, which of course makes churn less likely.

Number verify sounds simple, but that are lots of failure cases such as roaming, phone number recycling, active phone call, SIM swap, network connectivity, etc. All those cases contribute to the success of accurately authenticating the customer. Failure because of some network specific issue, when the customer is genuine, is not acceptable.

Stefan highlights a challenge for the industry on the misinformation on monetizing APIs from consultants. Many of those APIs should not be monetized, rather contribute to the accuracy of the number verify decision. Network APIs should never be considered atomically like SMS. It’s a solution.

This leads Stefan to continuous authentication, which is where the mobile industry should be in 2025. One of IPification’s push is encouraging telcos to support flat rate pricing, to enable continuous authentication.

Stefan quoted an Amazon statistic where a 1 sec delay in rendering a page leads to a 67% drop in sales. We are today highly intolerant of delay, compared to the dial up days of 30 years ago. Also 1 star app review ratings on app stores are often linked to SMS OTP not being delivered.

I then asked about customer targeting. Stefan highlights mobile authentication is part of a portfolio of solutions. Often at the initial critical point of onboarding a new customer. While other solutions, like passkeys, can be used at other, later interactions. Though Stefan highlighted the possession factor issues of passkeys in some markets.

Fintech is the popular vertical across the market, for IPification ecommerce, social networks, market places, food delivery, etc. are growing rapidly. In some markets the phone number is the only way to identify on social networks.

One indicator of high adoption is where SMS cost has risen rapidly in response to businesses using SMS less because of fraud, see the Great LATAM A2P SMS Robbery as an example. This brought us to the strategic issue on network API pricing, a new commercial model must be adopted, flat rate. The challenge is the SMS product manager in the telco likely does not have the freedom to make such a progressive pricing decision.

We then shifted to the future of the industry. The recent shift is the adoption of mobile connect by large enterprises as SMS has failed to address fraud. This needs to expand to the large cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google; AND they also make it easy for the long tail to adopt mobile connect. AND offer solutions that make customer acquisition easier.

This brought me to my core issue, how can the cloud providers partner with the carriers when their pricing is not flat rate and worse heading to $1 per SMS?

Here SEA (South East Asia) gives Stefan hope, as they are moving in the right direction with per user per month pricing. This is not the first time SEA has taken a lead. I’ve highlighted many times how IdeaMart in Sri Lanka has led developer innovation for over one decade. The reason it did not spread is the usual western prejudice of, “that’s an emerging market thing”.

Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself. The telecom industry needs to stop talking about APIs, rather continuous authentication solutions. Partner with the cloud providers to deliver joint commercial success. IPification is leading the way, and I wish them the best of luck.