Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS) Market

GSMA counts 5.8 billion unique mobile subscribers in 2025, about 70% of the world’s population, and each one is a billing relationship that can carry more than airtime and data. Mobile value added services (MVAS) are the paid services that ride on that relationship: the market covers application-to-person (A2P) and business messaging, direct carrier billing, mobile infotainment and caller tunes, consumer short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) bundles, mobile money and wallet fees, and location and network application programming interface (API) services. Douglas Insights sizes the Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS) market at USD 168.03 billion in 2025, which is 5.8 billion subscribers multiplied by USD 28.97 of MVAS revenue per subscriber per year. By 2035 the total reaches USD 342.95 billion, a revenue CAGR of 7.40%, made of 1.7% subscriber growth and a 5.6% rise in spend per subscriber. The structural event came on 29 July 2025, when Ericsson completed the Aduna joint venture with twelve operators, including AT&T, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Reliance Jio, Verizon and Vodafone, to sell network APIs on one platform. This study is part of the Douglas Insights telecom and networks coverage and is built under the published research methodology.

Which MVAS line makes the money: A2P messaging, carrier billing, mobile money or network APIs?

A2P and business messaging earns the most in mobile value added services: USD 57.30 billion, 34.1% of 2025 value, because every one-time passcode (OTP) and alert is billed per message to an enterprise.

A2P and business messaging grows 8.4% a year to USD 128.36 billion, since OTP traffic rises with every new app account and rich communication services (RCS) business messages carry a higher price than plain text. Direct carrier billing holds USD 37.64 billion, a 22.4% share, because app stores, video services and games let prepaid users without cards pay on the phone bill. Mobile infotainment and caller tunes earn USD 25.71 billion, 15.3% of value, and grow only 2.6% as streaming apps absorb the content that operators once sold by subscription. Consumer SMS and MMS bundles bring in USD 22.01 billion, 13.1%, and shrink 3.4% a year as over-the-top (OTT) chat apps replace person-to-person texting. Mobile money and wallet fees account for USD 15.29 billion, 9.1%, and climb 13.7% a year on cash-out, transfer, merchant and overdraft fees.

Location and network API services are the fastest-growing MVAS segment at 14.9% a year, rising from USD 10.08 billion, 6.0% of value, to USD 40.43 billion by 2035. Fraud checks such as SIM swap and number verification are the reason: banks pay per API call to confirm that a phone number has not just moved to a new SIM. Segment values for 2035 sum to USD 341.49 billion, 0.42% below the headline.

Why are one-time passcodes and mobile money wallets pushing MVAS demand up?

Spend per subscriber drives MVAS demand: it rises 5.6% a year, against 1.7% growth in the subscriber base, so roughly three quarters of the 7.40% revenue growth comes from each subscriber buying more services.

Subscriber additions supply the 1.7-point volume leg. GSMA puts unique subscribers at 5.8 billion in 2025, and Douglas Insights projects 6.86 billion by 2035, with most new users in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. New subscribers there join on prepaid plans, and MVAS revenue per subscriber in those markets starts below USD 10 a year. Volume adds breadth. Spend per subscriber adds the value.

Passcodes, wallets and network APIs

Authentication and business messaging adds 2.3 points to spend per subscriber. Twilio, the largest listed messaging platform, reported 2025 revenue of USD 5.07 billion, up 14%, and more than 402,000 active customer accounts at 31 December 2025, against more than 325,000 a year earlier, according to its fourth-quarter release. Each new enterprise sender buys passcodes, alerts and marketing messages, and each message passes a carrier fee to the terminating operator. Douglas Insights estimates that OTP and transactional alerts make up about 58% of A2P message volume in 2025.

Mobile money adds 1.3 points. Mobile money accounts reached 2.3 billion in 2025, with 268 million added during the year and USD 2 trillion of transactions, double the 2021 level, according to the GSMA report of 24 March 2026. Active 30-day accounts stood at 593 million, up 15%. Each active account generates fees on cash-out, bill payments and merchant purchases, and operators now add credit and insurance products to the same wallet.

Network APIs add 0.9 points from a small base. Aduna, the joint venture completed on 29 July 2025, aggregates network APIs for twelve operator shareholders and partners such as Google Cloud, Microsoft, Vonage and Sinch, so a developer can buy one fraud check across many networks. Direct carrier billing adds 1.1 points, and infotainment adds 0.4 points. Consumer SMS takes 0.4 points away. The six effects net to the 5.6-point spend leg, which combines with the 1.7-point volume leg to give 7.40%.

Prepaid and postpaid payers

Handset reach sets the ceiling on every one of these mobile services. Consumers on prepaid plans, about three quarters of subscribers in Africa and South Asia, buy daily or weekly packs, while postpaid users in North America and Europe see MVAS charges added to a monthly bill. Douglas Insights estimates that enterprises pay for 41.2% of MVAS value in 2025 through A2P messages and API calls, and consumers pay the other 58.8% through carrier billing, wallet fees, packs and bundles. Enterprise spend grows faster, so its share reaches about 49% by 2035.

Which hurdles hold back MVAS growth: SMS fraud, OTT chat apps or spam rules?

Three hurdles take 2.0 points off MVAS growth in the slower case, cutting the revenue CAGR from 7.40% to 5.35% and the 2035 value to USD 282.94 billion, USD 60.01 billion below the base case.

OTT chat substitution removes 0.8 points. Banks and retailers send more alerts through chat apps that bypass the operator, and every message moved off SMS removes a carrier fee from the MVAS pool. Consumer SMS and MMS bundles already shrink 3.4% a year for the same reason.

Artificially inflated traffic and grey routes remove 0.6 points. Fraudsters trigger fake OTP requests to premium-rate numbers, and senders route traffic through cheap SIM farms to avoid termination fees, so operators must spend on SMS firewalls. Douglas Insights puts grey-route leakage at about 9% of A2P SMS volume in emerging markets in 2025.

Spam rules remove 0.6 points. India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) amended its commercial communication regulations on 12 February 2025: customers now have 7 days to report spam instead of 3, and access providers must act on unregistered senders within 5 days instead of 30. Penalties on operators run from INR 2 lakh for a first misreporting violation to INR 10 lakh for later ones. Tighter rules clean up mobile messaging, but they also slow the growth of promotional traffic.

What do enterprises pay per A2P SMS segment, and how is carrier billing priced?

MVAS revenue averages USD 28.97 per subscriber per year in 2025, or USD 2.41 a month, and rises to USD 49.96 by 2035; per-message prices sit far below a cent once volume discounts apply.

List prices show the bands. In the United States, Twilio lists outbound SMS at USD 0.0083 per segment, plus carrier fees of USD 0.0035 for AT&T, USD 0.0045 for T-Mobile and USD 0.005 for Verizon. Outbound MMS lists at USD 0.022 per message, and a dedicated short code costs USD 1,000 to USD 1,500 a quarter. Large senders pay well below list. Douglas Insights values the global average realised A2P SMS price at about USD 0.012 per message in 2025, including the terminating operator fee.

Mobile money is priced as a share of value moved. Airtel Africa earned USD 1.36 billion of mobile money revenue in the year to March 2026 on an annualised transaction value above USD 215 billion, a yield of 0.63%. Direct carrier billing is priced as a revenue share: Boku, a carrier billing aggregator, earned USD 70.4 million of carrier billing revenue in 2025 on USD 15.7 billion of total payment volume across all its payment methods. Caller tunes and infotainment sell as weekly or monthly packs, typically under USD 1 in South Asia and Africa.

Who wins MVAS revenue: mobile operators, CPaaS vendors or wallet operators?

Mobile operators keep most MVAS revenue because they own the subscriber and the terminating network; no single company holds more than 3.0% of the USD 168.03 billion total in 2025.

Douglas Insights estimates that the top three disclosed specialists, Twilio, Sinch and Safaricom’s M-PESA, hold at most 5.5% of MVAS value, so the market is fragmented and operator-led. Twilio’s share counts its whole revenue, so the true messaging share is lower. Sinch reported 2025 net sales of SEK 27.08 billion, about USD 2.8 billion, built on direct connections to operators. Safaricom earned KES 182.73 billion from M-PESA, about USD 1.41 billion, in the year to March 2026. Airtel Africa reported mobile money revenue of USD 1.36 billion, up 36.3%, and 54.1 million mobile money customers in its results of 8 May 2026. Boku earned USD 128.8 million in 2025, and OnMobile Global earned INR 5.25 billion from caller tunes and games sold through operators.

Network equipment makers are joining the value chain. Ericsson holds 50% of Aduna, and the twelve operator shareholders hold the other 50%, so network API revenue will flow through a structure that operators co-own. Cloud contracts behind these platforms are covered in the Telecom Cloud Market report.

Where is MVAS revenue growing fastest, from Asia Pacific to Sub-Saharan Africa?

Asia Pacific leads MVAS revenue with USD 64.52 billion in 2025, 38.4% of value, because China and India hold the largest subscriber bases and the heaviest OTP traffic.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest region at 13.24% a year, rising from USD 11.93 billion to USD 41.38 billion, because mobile money there is an operator service and wallet fees add to every subscriber’s bill. Asia Pacific grows 7.6% to USD 134.22 billion on Indian and Indonesian OTP volume. North America holds USD 36.46 billion and grows 5.6%, with high per-message carrier fees but saturated subscriber counts. Europe is worth USD 30.75 billion and grows slowest at 4.8%, since chat apps carry most consumer messaging. Latin America reaches USD 32.07 billion by 2035 from USD 14.45 billion, growing 8.3% as Brazilian and Mexican banks move alerts to verified business messaging. The Middle East and North Africa is the wildcard: USD 9.91 billion in 2025 growing 8.9%, where Gulf wallet licences decide whether operators or banks capture payment fees. Radio and core upgrades behind these services are covered in the 5G Core Market report.

How does RCS business messaging change the economics of A2P SMS in MVAS?

RCS business messages carry branding, images and buttons, and Douglas Insights expects them to reach about 19% of A2P and business messaging revenue by 2035, up from about 4% in 2025.

A mobile RCS message is billed per message or per conversation, often at two to four times the price of a plain SMS segment, so a shift in mix lifts MVAS spend per subscriber even when message counts flatten. Operators keep the termination fee because RCS runs on their networks, unlike chat apps. The catch is reach. RCS needs a capable handset and an operator RCS hub, so senders still fall back to SMS for any phone that cannot receive it. Wider device and network context is covered in the Next Generation Wireless Communication Market report.

Why is mobile money the MVAS line operators prize most?

Mobile money yields recurring fees on USD 2 trillion of annual transactions, and Douglas Insights values this MVAS line at USD 15.29 billion in 2025, rising to USD 55.21 billion by 2035.

Wallets lock in subscribers. A customer who receives a salary or pays school fees through an operator wallet rarely switches network, and the wallet becomes the channel for credit, savings and insurance. GSMA reports that insurance offerings rose by one third in 2025, and only 25.7% of registered accounts were used in a given month, so activation is the growth lever. Douglas Insights counts that a 5-point rise in monthly activity would add about USD 3.0 billion of wallet fees by 2030.

Which TRAI rules and CAMARA standards govern A2P SMS and network API services?

Two rule sets shape MVAS: India’s TRAI spam regulation, amended on 12 February 2025, governs the largest A2P SMS market, and CAMARA open-source API definitions underpin the network API services that Aduna sells.

The TRAI amendment assigns the 140 number series to promotional calls and the 1600 series to transactional and service calls, and it bars a violating sender’s outgoing services for 15 days, then disconnects and blacklists repeat offenders for one year. Registered sender headers and content templates now gate every commercial message, which raises compliance cost for mobile messaging aggregators. Aduna builds on CAMARA, the open-source project for common network API definitions, so a SIM swap check returns the same result format on every member network. Mobile money falls under central bank e-money rules country by country, and those licences decide whether an operator can run a wallet at all.

What if RCS and network APIs scale faster: where does MVAS land in 2035?

In the base case MVAS revenue reaches USD 342.95 billion by 2035 on 1.7% subscriber growth and a 5.6% spend leg; the outcome spans USD 282.94 billion to USD 406.89 billion.

The slower case assumes chat apps take most bank alerts and spam rules spread from India to other large markets. The faster case assumes Aduna, operating since its 29 July 2025 completion, turns SIM swap and number verification into a default bank fraud check, and that RCS reaches most Android and iPhone users. Subscriber count is the smaller lever. Raising annual subscriber growth from 1.7% to 2.7% lifts 2035 to USD 378.20 billion, USD 35.25 billion above base. Published forecasts run from about 11.9% to 19.8% a year. Our 7.40% sits below that range because we exclude mobile advertising, app store sales and the face value of payments, and count only fees.

Douglas Exclusive: the operator MVAS monetisation scorecard

The scorecard is a Douglas Insights model built from 240 inputs: 40 operators rated from 0 to 5 on each of the six MVAS service lines, using published service catalogues and results.

The 40 groups average 2.6 out of 5. The 14 groups that hold a mobile money licence average 3.5, against 2.1 for the other 26. On network APIs, the 12 Aduna shareholder operators average 2.4, while the remaining 28 average 0.8.

The finding: the two lowest-scoring MVAS lines, mobile money at 1.9 and network APIs at 1.3, are the two fastest-growing segments, at 13.7% and 14.9% a year. Operators score best where revenue grows least. Douglas Insights reads this as the main opening for wallet partners and API aggregators, because most operators lack the licence or the platform to capture growth alone.

How the model turns 5.8 billion subscribers into USD 168.03 billion of MVAS revenue?

Our model multiplies 5.8 billion unique mobile subscribers by USD 28.97 of MVAS revenue per subscriber, giving USD 168.03 billion for 2025, or 168,026 in USD millions.

Coverage spans 6 regions, 52 countries and 6 service lines. The model uses 318 data points: subscriber counts, company results, list prices, mobile money volumes and 5 published growth rates. Volume grows 1.7% a year to 6.86 billion subscribers in 2035, and spend grows 5.6% a year to USD 49.96. Revenue growth of 7.40% equals 1.017 times 1.056, minus 1, to two decimals.

Three cross-checks follow. MVAS revenue equals 14.1% of the USD 1.19 trillion of 2025 operator revenue in the GSMA Mobile Economy 2026 report, in line with operator disclosures. Applying Airtel Africa’s 0.63% fee yield to USD 2 trillion of mobile money transactions gives USD 12.6 billion, 17.6% below our USD 15.29 billion, a gap explained by credit and merchant fees outside transaction value. Segment values for 2035 sum within 0.42% of the headline.

Sources

1. Ericsson Ericsson announces completion of Aduna transaction (2025)
2. GSMA The Mobile Economy 2026 (2026)
3. GSMA Mobile Money accounted for USD 2 trillion in transactions in 2025 (2026)
4. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India TRAI amends TCCCPR 2018, press release 11 of 2025 (2025)
5. Airtel Africa via FCA National Storage Mechanism Airtel Africa results for the year ended 31 March 2026 (2026)
6. Twilio Twilio fourth quarter and full year 2025 results (2026)
7. Twilio US SMS pricing (2026)
8. Sinch Sinch fourth quarter and full year 2025 results (2026)
9. OnMobile Global OnMobile fourth quarter FY2026 results (2026)