Last week in Madrid, the Aduna Summit brought the industry together around something that has been “just around the corner” for years: Network APIs.
This time felt different.
There is real momentum. Real use cases. Real demand. And credit where credit is due—Aduna, Ericsson, and the telco partners are doing the hard work of aligning operators, standardizing capabilities, and building the supply side of this market.
That matters.
But alongside that progress, there is also pressure building.
Because while the foundations are being put in place, the market is already asking for more. And the gap between the two is becoming increasingly visible.
Horizon 1 is here—and it’s about trust
If you strip away the noise, the current phase is quite clear.
Network APIs are gaining traction in one domain above all others: identity, fraud prevention, and trust.
Number verification, silent authentication, SIM swap checks—these are no longer theoretical. They are being deployed, tested, and increasingly adopted.
What’s changed is the demand side.
Platforms like Meta are actively investing in what they call Meta Auth. Companies like LexisNexis and FICO are embedding telco signals into broader risk frameworks. And AWS put it very directly on stage:
“Network APIs are the ultimate standardized, secure, and cost-effective solution for both developers and users.”
That’s the ambition.
But it also makes one thing very clear: nobody is buying a Network API.
They are buying a trust layer—something that reduces fraud, removes friction, and enables better digital experiences. The API is just the plumbing.
The missing layer is becoming obvious
And this is where the real tension starts.
Walk around the Summit and you’ll hear a lot about onboarding operators, exposing APIs, and standardization efforts like CAMARA. All essential. All in progress.
But that’s not where the market challenge sits.
Because between the telco and the enterprise, there is still a gap.
And that gap is increasingly being filled by a growing ecosystem. Startups like Shush, Ipification, and OneID. More established players like XConnect. And CPaaS platforms such as Vonage, Infobip, and Proximus Global.
They are not waiting for the ecosystem to be perfect. They are already turning capabilities into usable solutions.
They are building what the market actually needs: a trust layer on top of the network.
Because enterprises—especially outside the hyperscaler world—are not looking to assemble APIs themselves. They want something that works, scales, and can be trusted.
At the same time: execution is still lagging
While the opportunity is clear, execution is still catching up.
Onboarding can take weeks—or even months. Pricing is unclear, inconsistent, and often hidden behind NDAs. Coverage is fragmented. And in many cases, telcos are not yet using these capabilities at scale internally.
It creates a strange contrast.
We talk about real-time trust, AI-driven systems, and global platforms. But it can still take three months to get access to an API.
That gap is not just inconvenient. It slows down the entire ecosystem.
And as Julia Colven from McKinsey pointed out, many enterprises are still not fully convinced that the telco ecosystem can deliver these capabilities at global scale with the simplicity and reliability they expect.
That’s not a criticism. It’s a signal.
This is a long game—but not a slow one
The presence of analysts like S&P Global, STL Partners, and Analysys Mason helped put things into perspective.
All of them are bullish.
This is widely seen as a $10 to $100 billion market over the next decade.
But the nuance matters.
This is not a short-term breakout. It’s a long-term shift. As Raul Castanon from S&P Global highlighted, telcos are evolving complex, large-scale infrastructures. It takes time for infrastructure to be upgraded.
In that sense, this is a marathon.
But it doesn’t have the luxury of moving slowly.
Because demand is already here. And expectations are rising fast.
APIs don’t create demand—outcomes do
There was another signal at the Summit that is worth calling out.
For all the talk about APIs and developers, there were very few actual developers in the room.
And that says something.
Developers don’t start with APIs. They start with problems. Reduce fraud. Improve onboarding. Verify identity.
If an API helps, great. If not, they’ll find another way.
APIs are not the product. They are the mechanism.
Which means the industry needs to shift its focus—from exposing capabilities to delivering outcomes.
Because if we don’t clearly define and package what these APIs are meant to achieve, adoption will remain limited—regardless of how well the APIs themselves are built.
This is bigger than Network APIs
One of the risks right now is to treat Network APIs as a standalone topic.
They are not.
They sit at the intersection of much bigger shifts: AI, sovereignty, identity, real-time communications, and increasingly, agent-driven systems.
AWS made that point clearly as well. The future consumer of these capabilities will not just be applications—it will increasingly be AI agents, operating in real time and requiring trust, identity, and consent as part of their core logic.
That changes the game.
Because in an agentic world, trust is not a feature. It becomes infrastructure.
Alignment is progress
Anthony Bartolo, Aduna’s CEO, captured this nicely in his opening keynote with a simple equation:
Alignment = Progress
And looking at the current state of the ecosystem, it’s clear we are somewhere in the middle of that journey. Past the initial fragmentation, but not yet fully aligned.
Which also explains why progress—while real—is still uneven.
Where the ecosystem comes together
A big takeaway from Madrid is that the ecosystem is starting to take shape.
Aduna and its partners are focused on solving the supply side—and making real progress. But supply alone is not enough.
To scale, the ecosystem needs companies that turn APIs into products, platforms that bring them to market, startups that drive innovation, and capital that helps them grow.
This is where we see our role with CPaaSAA.
Not to replicate what others are doing—but to complement it.
To bring telcos, CPaaS players, startups, and partners together. To help translate capability into real-world deployment. And to support the growth of the companies building this next layer.
In close collaboration with Sandbox Industries, we are also connecting this ecosystem with capital and structured growth—because without that middle layer, this doesn’t scale.
What’s at stake
This is not just about APIs.
For telcos, this is about relevance.
We’ve seen what happens when execution falls short. Messaging is the obvious example—value moved elsewhere, quickly and decisively.
There is a real risk that history repeats itself.
But there is also a real opportunity to do it differently this time. To invest in the ecosystem, to support the companies building the trust layer, and to play a more active role in shaping what comes next.
Final thought
The Aduna Summit showed that the industry is moving in the right direction.
There is real momentum—and real credit goes to Aduna, Ericsson and its JV partners for pushing this forward.
Now the focus needs to shift.
From building supply to scaling adoption.
From APIs to outcomes.
From individual efforts to a connected ecosystem that actually works.
Because in the end, this is not just a Network API story.
It is a trust story.
And that’s a much bigger prize.
I've spent my career in IT and telecoms building bridges, from the early days of cloud communications to today's reset around APIs, CPaaS and AI.
As Founding Partner of The Next Cloud and CPaaSAA, I help telcos, CPaaS players and AI-native scaleups work out where they fit in the AI era, through strategy, ecosystem building and events.
My view: the value is moving from platforms to outcomes, and real innovation comes from ecosystems, not incumbents acting alone.
Based in Amsterdam, usually somewhere else.
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