The volume of business Rich Communication Services (RCS) messages is projected to rise by 286 per cent globally, reaching more than 485 billion by 2030 from 125 billion in 2026, as businesses increasingly shift from traditional SMS to richer and more interactive messaging, a new Juniper Research study has found.
The research attributed the projected growth to the expanding adoption of RCS, particularly following Apple’s decision to support the messaging standard on its devices in 2024.
According to the report, 2025 represented a pivotal year for RCS, driven by expanding subscriber reach and growing interest from enterprises. It said the next phase of growth would increasingly come from businesses using RCS for conversational applications, including customer support and sales, rather than relying mainly on one-way messaging.
RCS offers businesses capabilities beyond conventional SMS, including branded messaging, enhanced authentication and interactive communication that can support more direct engagement with customers.
The report identified authentication as one of the key drivers of the migration from SMS to RCS, particularly as businesses seek more secure and branded ways to verify customers without additional messaging costs.
Juniper Research advised communication service providers to first target business messaging traffic that can be migrated easily from SMS to RCS. This, it said, would help businesses understand the benefits of the technology before moving to more advanced applications, including conversational messaging.
Retail leads adoption as banking, healthcare accelerate
Retail is expected to remain the largest single sector for business RCS messaging through 2030, accounting for more than 30 per cent of global messages by the end of the forecast period.
However, its share of the market is projected to decline from more than 37 per cent in 2026 as adoption accelerates across other sectors.
Juniper Research projected that business RCS messaging in healthcare would grow by more than 1,000 per cent by 2030, while banking would record growth of more than 600 per cent. Retail, by comparison, is expected to grow by slightly more than 200 per cent.
The disparity indicates that while retail has been an early adopter of RCS, industries such as banking and healthcare are now beginning to accelerate their use of the technology, particularly for authentication and customer engagement.
Peter Boyland, Principal Analyst at Juniper Research, said authentication would remain a major RCS use case across sectors, particularly for banks and healthcare providers.
He added that branding and personalisation were becoming increasingly important to customer retention in the banking sector, making RCS a suitable channel for financial institutions seeking to strengthen customer relationships.
Meanwhile, Molly Gatford, senior research analyst at Juniper Research, said the growing use of RCS as a conversational channel would require mobile operators to obtain more detailed insights into how businesses and customers use the platform.
“As more brands use RCS as a conversational channel, mobile operators must partner with providers offering transparency into conversational traffic, specifically conversation duration, message volume, and how the conversation was initiated,” she said.
Gatford said such data would become increasingly important as mobile operators develop differentiated pricing models for conversational RCS services.
