What the CPaaSAA Telco API Working Group heard in August: one company’s go-to-market, and a map of the ecosystem it sits in.
We nearly didn’t hold the August session. The second week of August is the dead centre of the European holiday period and the sensible thing would have been to skip a month. We held it because participants asked us to — which tells you something in itself. The network API conversation has stopped being a standards conversation people attend out of obligation and become a commercial conversation people make time for.
Two presentations, and between them they framed the question this market now has to answer. One company explaining how it intends to make money from network APIs. And a piece of research trying to describe the whole ecosystem that company operates in — who does what, what the roles actually are, and why the industry keeps talking past itself.
Working group sessions run under the Chatham House Rule. What follows is published with the presenters’ agreement.
What Proximus Global is actually building
Alessia Basile, who runs network API go-to-market at BICS, opened by clearing up a confusion she runs into constantly: Proximus Global is not Proximus Belgium. It is the international arm — BICS, Telesign and Route Mobile operating as one group.
The lineage matters because it explains the strategy. BICS and Route Mobile were both founded in 2004, Telesign in 2005. BICS acquired Telesign in 2017; Proximus took full ownership of BICS and Telesign, later acquiring a majority stake in Route Mobile; and in January 2025 the three came together as Proximus Global. Separate legal entities, shared marketing, consolidated product, legal and IT.
The portfolio maps onto three verbs. Connect is the BICS heritage — interoperability, IPX, carrier services, more than 50% of the world’s roaming data traffic. Protect is Telesign — fraud prevention and digital identity, with over 2,000 identity signals and verification volumes in the tens of billions annually. Engage is Route Mobile — omnichannel messaging and cloud communications, WhatsApp, RCS, voice, chatbots.
Konera is the network API platform BICS launched around a year ago. It ingests, structures, standardises and exposes operator network capabilities as consumable APIs — number verification, SIM swap, device swap, scam signals, location, quality on demand, branded calling.
The interesting part is not the platform. It is the three routes to market:
One — trade with operators and aggregators for coverage. Raw APIs exchanged to build a global footprint, the same way voice and messaging coverage has always been built.
Two — retail through the group’s own brands. Konera capabilities embedded into Telesign’s fraud and identity products and Route Mobile’s engagement products, reaching thousands of enterprises that have never heard of a network API and have no reason to.
Three — wholesale onward. Raw APIs to hyperscalers, to other aggregators completing their coverage, and to operators buying back the rest of their own domestic market for their B2B business.
There is a fourth thing that is not a route to market but may matter more than any of them. Because Telesign and Route Mobile sit inside the group, demand feedback arrives directly. Most wholesale players learn what enterprises want second-hand, filtered through resellers, months late. This one gets told by colleagues. In a market where supply has comfortably outrun demand, that loop is worth more than another interface.
Then Alessia said the thing that turned out to be the hinge of the whole session.
Konera does not require operators to expose to a single specification before it will work with them. It meets each operator at whatever level of maturity that operator has actually reached, and does the standardising itself where the use case justifies it — including running the entitlement server for number verification where an operator has not got there yet. Collaborative rather than prescriptive.
That is not a soft position. It is an admission about the state of the market, and anyone building a global wholesale play has to make it. Operators are not interchangeable. One has number verification on the current specification, another on the previous one, a third has equivalent functionality it has never described in those terms at all. You cannot simply route across that. Something has to sit in the middle, absorb the variation, and present one consumable thing to a buyer who neither knows nor cares which operator answered.
Which is precisely what an aggregation layer is for. Not a routing table — a cushion between an uneven supply base and a demand side that needs consistency.
Twenty years of building wholesale trading businesses in messaging and voice, now pointed at network capability. It is a coherent commercial answer, and it is coherent precisely because it is not a new idea. It is an old idea applied to a new supply.
Maturity is the question, and nobody could answer it
Meeting operators where they are only works if you know where they are. And that, it turns out, is the question the whole market has been unable to answer with any rigour — not just about operators, but about every part of the ecosystem.
That is what the second presentation was about.
The CPaaSAA network API research programme has been running since the spring: around 80 primary interviews across operators, platforms, integrators, industry bodies, regulators and analysts, alongside more than 70 documented network API deployments sitting inside a case directory of over 200. Andrew Collinson is writing it now. It launches at CASA26.
Maturity is its spine, and getting to it required solving a problem first. You cannot measure how mature the market is until you can say what its parts are. And this industry has been remarkably bad at that, because it uses words that no longer carry meaning.
“Aggregator” is the clearest example. It now covers companies with fundamentally different business models, customers and economics — everybody aggregates something, so the word tells a buyer nothing and a prospective partner less. Participants who compete in some segments and partner in others could not always agree on what each other did.
So the research starts by naming the roles properly. Eleven of them, arranged from the demand side to the supply side: enterprise buyers, solution integrators, application builders, engagement and identity platforms, hyperscalers, multi-network gateways, network exposure platforms, mobile operators, industry bodies, regulators, and the analyst community. Konera sits in the multi-network gateway role. Telesign and Route Mobile sit in the engagement and identity platform role. That distinction is invisible if you call all of them aggregators, and it is the difference between two entirely separate businesses.
One word is deliberately absent: developer. Two problems with it. There are developers everywhere in this ecosystem, so it identifies nobody. And it drags in the 2010-era image of an individual with a credit card buying API calls — which is not who buys telco APIs today, and may never be.
With the roles named, maturity becomes measurable. Each group can be assessed against a common ladder, running from no meaningful commercial activity, through isolated cases, through it works but it is patchy and not yet repeatable, up to proven and growing, and finally to being simply the expected default. Individual players can be placed on it. Groups can be compared. And the blockers stop being one undifferentiated complaint about “the market” and become specific: coverage and pricing here, converting proofs of concept there, telco pace somewhere else, privacy and consent somewhere else again.
That is when the conversation gets useful. Not is this market working — a question that only ever produces a shrug — but which part of it is behind, on what dimension, and what would move it.
What we can say now
The detailed picture belongs in the report. Two things are worth putting into the market ahead of it.
The first is the shape of the portfolio. Most of the current interest in GSMA Open Gateway and CAMARA APIs resolves into three needs-based families: identity and trust signals, which verify who a person is using signals from their mobile account; location intelligence, which reports where a device is or how many devices are in an area; and assured connectivity, which controls or reports the quality of a connection. Three families, three different routes to market, three different levels of commercial maturity, and three different sets of ecosystem requirements. Treating them as one market is why so many portfolio conversations go nowhere.
The second is a change of noun. Sold as APIs, these capabilities compete on integration effort and per-call pricing, in front of an engineering audience. But nobody has ever wanted an API. What a buyer wants is to know something — that this person is who they claim to be, that this SIM has not just been swapped, that this connection will hold. They are buying a signal. What the signal buys them is confidence in an outcome, repeated at scale. Confirm, reassure, assure, inform.
And one conclusion, which we will let stand as a teaser: on the evidence gathered so far, this market is doing considerably better than most of the people in it believe. Not uniformly, and not everywhere. But the pessimism is not supported by the case evidence — and part of the reason the pessimism persists is that the organisations doing well have been almost entirely silent about it.
Why that matters, what it would take to keep it going, and where it could still stall, is the report.
Both halves, one room
Put the two presentations next to each other and you have the shape of the thing. A framework that describes the roles and measures how far each has come, and a company occupying one of those roles with a fully-formed commercial answer. Neither is complete alone. The framework without commercial reality is an academic exercise; the commercial answer without the framework is one company’s story.
The research goes to CPaaSAA members first, ahead of its launch at CASA26 in Amsterdam, 21–23 September. Monday and Tuesday are the main conference — AI, AI Voice, sovereignty, the future of UCaaS and CCaaS, and on Tuesday a session built around identity, trust, and what network APIs deliver rather than what they are. Wednesday belongs to the GSMA: a closed-door Market Champions workshop bringing European operators together on what the region does next. Operators joining Wednesday are welcome across Monday and Tuesday, and we would encourage it — two days of demand-side evidence, then the supply side in a room together. The order is deliberate.
Proximus Global is a Gold sponsor of CASA26 and will be telling the Konera story there in full.
The Telco API Working Group is open to CPaaSAA members. It meets monthly, under the Chatham House Rule, and — as August demonstrated — whether or not the calendar says it should.
CPaaSAA is a working platform for the Intelligent Engagement ecosystem, organised around Trust, Intelligence and Acceleration. To join the Telco API Working Group or to attend CASA26, get in touch.
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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