What a conversation with Proximus Global’s network API lead reveals about who is actually buying, what they are actually buying, and why the agentic wave may not arrive on schedule.
Ask almost anyone in this industry to describe the network API opportunity and you will be shown a map of the world. Global coverage. One contract, one endpoint, hundreds of operators behind a single integration. Every aggregation platform opens with some version of that map.
Then someone who runs one of those platforms tells you that roughly four out of five transactions never leave the country they started in.
That figure came from Ievgen Martsin, VP Network API and Programmable Voice & Messaging at Proximus Global, in a CPaaSAA Talk with Founding Partner Rob Kurver ahead of CASA26, where Proximus Global joins us as a Gold Sponsor. The conversation was meant to be an introduction to Konera, the network API platform Proximus Global launched last year. It became something more useful than that: a practitioner’s account of where the money in this market actually sits.
The market is domestic, and that changes who wins
By Proximus Global’s own statistics, around 80% of network API volume is domestic. The canonical transaction is not a global platform reaching across borders. It is an Indian bank validating an Indian retail customer on Indian soil. Four cases out of five look like that.
The international traffic — the part the coverage maps are built to sell — carries what Ievgen described plainly as a very tiny margin, because it comes from hyperscalers that route almost instantaneously on price and reach, with little decision-making in between.
That is the demand-side number the supply-side argument has been waiting for. Country-by-country coverage has been the direction of travel for some time — it is how Aduna has assembled its footprint operator by operator, and it is the position we have been pressing from our own stages. What has been thinner on the ground is evidence that the traffic itself behaves that way. Here it is. If four in five transactions are domestic, then global reach is table stakes and local presence is the product. Coverage is a map; distribution is a relationship. Which is why Ievgen was unambiguous about what it takes to enter a market like India: relationships are everything, and arriving on day one without them is a very difficult story. Proximus Global — BICS, Telesign and Route Mobile under one roof — did not arrive on day one. Route Mobile was already established across APAC, already holding the relationships with the players that matter, already inside the local commercial culture rather than negotiating with it from outside.
Where the industry still lags is in its headline framing. A great deal of collective effort has gone into cross-border standardisation and global availability narratives — necessary work, and not wasted. But the transaction that pays is happening inside one country, between institutions that already know each other, and the firms winning it are the ones with people on the ground. Coverage counted in countries is not a lesser version of global reach. It is the more accurate description of the market.
This is the fourth hub telecoms has built
There is a tendency to treat network APIs as a discontinuity — a new category requiring new entrants and new constructs. Ievgen’s framing is the opposite, and it is more convincing.
Over twenty years ago, the business that became BICS found a way to exchange voice through a hub rather than through point-to-point connectivity. That hub effect worked, so it grew: a voice hub became an SMS hub, then a roaming hub, then whichever hub the technology cycle demanded next. Network APIs, in this reading, are simply the fourth iteration of a pattern this industry already knows how to run.
What carries forward is not the technology. It is three things: master service agreements with more than 300 operators, the technical integration behind them, and — the one that cannot be bought — the trust that comes from being a known counterparty doing its native business. As Ievgen put it, it would be a crime not to build on a foundation like that.
That is a genuinely different starting position from building the aggregation layer as a new construct and assembling the operator relationships afterwards. It is also a reminder that in wholesale telecoms, the hard asset has always been the contract and the credibility, not the interface on top of it.
The raw API is the least valuable thing they sell
The sharpest line in the conversation was about product, not market. There is a lot of talk, Ievgen observed, about raw APIs as though they were a panacea. The reality is the use case — and a use case needs a plan B and a plan C, fallback paths when the primary signal is unavailable, and commercial terms that make the whole thing worth deploying. That gets packaged as a solution, and the solution is what an enterprise buys.
Which produces an unusually clear picture of three different buyers, wanting three different things:
Enterprises and banks buy solutions, not endpoints, and they buy them through Telesign and Route Mobile, who hold the customer relationship. Konera functions as the data provider underneath. Other aggregators buy raw reach, because every aggregator has gaps in its footprint and would rather cover them through a counterparty than build them — an admission that is rarer in public than it should be, and a healthier description of this market than the winner-takes-all framing usually applied to it. Hyperscalers also buy raw APIs, bringing volume and a specific technology requirement, though Ievgen characterised that play as opportunistic and market-dependent.
Note what that means. The value of the product runs inversely to the size of the buyer. The largest buyers purchase the cheapest form of it, and the margin sits with the enterprise use case that needed the fallbacks, the packaging and the commercial model. Anyone building a network API business on hyperscaler volume is building on the thinnest part of the stack.
Branded calling is the first one that makes money rather than saving it
Almost all commercial network API traffic today sits in security and trust — SIM swap, number verification, silent authentication — sold into financial services. Valuable, and also fundamentally a cost-avoidance story. Fraud you did not suffer.
Ievgen pointed to branded calling as the interesting departure: integrate it into a CCaaS provider’s existing offering and the conversion rate on calls goes up. That is not loss prevention, it is revenue creation, and it changes the conversation an operator can have with an enterprise buyer. It is a small example with a large implication — the first network API use case that appears on the top line rather than in the risk budget.
The agent problem is commercial, not technical
The most valuable part of the conversation was where Ievgen declined to tell us what we wanted to hear.
Every forecast in circulation assumes agentic AI multiplies network API consumption. The technical case is sound, and he made it himself: agents can consume these APIs through an MCP server, and Proximus Global has one. If silent verification or SIM swap checks become part of every transaction rather than every login, the call volumes multiply by ten or a hundred.
Then he explained why he does not expect it to happen soon. The commercial model underneath network APIs is transactional — value poured from one glass into another, per call, per check. Agentic consumption does not work that way; it needs something closer to a subscription. And a subscription needs a payer.
Walk the candidates. Operators will not sponsor it — they want the same revenue, preferably more, in the same transactional shape. The aggregator cannot absorb it, sitting on a thin margin. The enterprise will not fund it simply so that an agent can function. Something, as Ievgen put it, has to change in the market — and until it does, he does not believe the volumes appear. His horizon on that: not within two years, and not until the commercial models adapt.
A partner that has already done the technical work, arguing publicly against the demand curve that would benefit him most, is worth more than a dozen forecasts. It also lands precisely on the gap this industry keeps refusing to close. We have spent three years building supply and calling it a market. The endpoints work. The standards are converging. What is missing is the commercial model — who pays, on what basis, at what price — and no amount of API coverage substitutes for it.
Which is why one of the CASA26 sessions next week in Amsterdam is on pricing models, and why this conversation makes it the session to watch. The question in the room is no longer whether the network can be called. It is who writes the cheque when a million agents start calling it.
Proximus Global is a Gold Sponsor of CASA26, taking place in Amsterdam. Ievgen Martsin spoke with Rob Kurver as part of the CPaaSAA Talks series.
My lifetime in IT and telecoms has been dedicated to innovation, building bridges and creating change. From the early days of cloud communications to working with operators on innovations and business development, and currently emphasizing APIs, CPaaS/CX and AI, my journey has been one of continuous evolution.
As founding partner at CPaaS Acceleration Alliance and The Next Cloud I'm privileged to help global telcos and techcos thrive in a fast changing world - through events, community building, strategy and global business development. I thrive on challenges and change, strategizing in cloud communications, and bringing people together for mutual success. Travel and continuous learning are my passions.
I believe the global communications industry is pivoting to prioritize customer experience and impactful solutions over mere technology and platforms, and we can tackle societal challenges by merging the strengths of corporates and innovators within new ecosystems.
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