Q+A: The humble text message is getting a major upgrade

Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Michael Thompson. Now, text messaging has been around for decades now, but the humble SMS is about to get a pretty significant upgrade. A technology called RCS is designed to make the standard messaging app on your phone a whole lot more interactive. Businesses essentially, as far as I understand it, can have two-way conversations with customers, you can have images and buttons, and importantly, verify who they are It's pretty well established overseas. Now it's gaining momentum here in Australia. Hugh Haley is Senior Director, Partners and Carriers, APAC at Cinch, which is a great supporter of fear and greed. Hugh, welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A.

Thank you, Michael.

Did I get that roughly right in the intro? Because most of us have been using SMS forever. What is actually changing here? Well,

Surprisingly, yeah, really good. I'm not sure what I can add on top of it.

You're no longer needed here. Thanks for your

time. RCS actually is a present technology in Australia already. If you're using an Android device, you'll use RCS to send messages from Android device to Android device. What's changing is that iOS, Apple, and Google Android are going to interconnect, so they're going to play nicely together. So that's the fundamental change. And then the upshot is that that gives businesses access to a kind of richer messaging environment. But the fundamental thing that's driving this is Google Android devices are going to play nicer with Apple devices. So peer-to-peer, you can send me a picture You can join an iOS group chat. So there's kind of an uplift for peer-to-peer, but then also the benefit for businesses comes in, effectively allows businesses to completely transform the way they talk to their customers in that messaging inbox.

Just even just as a consumer, I think we've all had those kind of group chats where all of a sudden one person is using an Android phone and it means that no one is getting the blue messages anymore. They're not

welcome to the party.

Indeed, and they do get excluded quite quickly. So is it about then replacing SMS or will the two kind of coexist essentially or is it just adapting what we currently have?

Like, I mean, it's not going to be like a rapid change. Ultimately, a sort of user-to-user level that will be rolled out quite rapidly. But then the way that the operating systems are going to play nicely with each other is going to be launched slowly by carriers, right? So one of the reasons this hasn't already arrived in Australia is the way that they interconnect is at a carrier level. So Telstra, Optus and TPG will need to do some work in order to make this happen. Now, it's too early to say, but we're pretty confident we'll be seeing at least one Telco live this year, which is exciting. I can't name who they are, but we'll be working to have RCS 2A network live in Australia this year. the other two carriers will then subsequently need to do that bit of work to enable everyone to get access to the improvements of the service.

And I imagine once one does, the pressure

is on

the other two

to get

moving