Mobile 2025

Predicting the Mobile Industry’s biggest challenges in 2025

By Dario Betti, Mobile Ecosystem Forum 

New year, new challenges – that’s the case with most sectors and it’s no different for the mobile industry. I asked a few of the members of the Board of Directors at The Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) to share their thoughts on what 2025 had in store for the mobile industry.

IOT security standards are coming

Dawood Ghalaieny (MEF Board Member and CEO of Zariot) believes that with the increasing number and complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the amount of sensitive data they collect and transmit, security is a critical concern. Ensuring the security of IoT systems is essential both for protecting the privacy and safety of individuals and organisations, as well as maintaining the integrity and reliability of critical infrastructure.

Dawood says: “For example, consider the effect of everyone in the UK turning on their washing machine at the same time. Not only might it overload the national grid, but it could also lead to a temporary water shortage. Instead of washing machines, consider a similar scenario with IoT devices. As IoT devices—such as EV charging points—become commonplace, the risk and damage an attack might cause increases.”

Unfortunately, the industry is failing to self-regulate when it comes to IoT security. Paying a premium to enforce IoT security or standards isn’t profitable, so there is no incentive for device manufacturers to worry. As a result, regulators are currently grappling with the issue and Dawood expects there to be legislation in 2023: “This will make it more difficult for businesses to enter the IoT market and existing market players will need to be ready to develop stricter IoT security standards in response to this legislation. Rather than simply pushing new products out to market, manufacturers will need to address security issues by embedding measures such as encryption, authentication, access control, and vulnerability management into their IoT devices. So, prepare now!” 

Conversational AI will grow rapidly

In addition to being a MEF Board Member, Waheed Adam, is Executive Chairperson at iTouch, and in the coming year, he expects to see a huge shift in Rich Communication Services (RCS), with many more enterprises having conversations with their customers rather than a one-way unilateral communication. 

Brands are already slowly evolving into a more human-like entity. Even on social media, brands are almost emulating human behaviour to the world at large, which helps them embody their value systems. It also helps showcase their offerings as a human salesperson would, conversing with their end consumers in that same tonality.

With the rapid development in Conversational AI, powered by Conversational Process Automation (CPA), artificial intelligence can bridge the gap between the customer and process automation systems by automating both conversations and processes.

Waheed says: “So, a business could launch a WhatsApp channel, showcase their items and then allow customers to converse with an online AI salesperson to ask questions and complete their purchase. The power of Conversational AI can be combined with breakthrough innovative payment technology, such as Unified Payment Interface (UPI), to allow customers to make bank payments instantaneously via their mobile number.”

So, not only can customers browse through a carousel of products and talk to a sales AI, but they can even select the items, put them in a cart, and actually make the online payment transaction through WhatsApp. There is no need to step out of the WhatsApp ecosystem onto an external website. Everything is available end-to-end.

This is a powerful process and adds a lot of value to OTT services like WhatsApp and its regional equivalents. It brings omnichannel processes into a single channel, joining up the user’s journey on their behalf.

Preventing fraud will become essential

MEF Board Member (and VP Partnership and Alliances at Tanla) Anurag Aggarwal says that as the global technology market has grown, so too has a shadow economy of fake accounts. Robots set up fake accounts which are then served ads, draining advertising budget with no benefit. It’s also hard to estimate the size of this shadow economy – it could already be very big.

Anurag says: “Telecoms operators play a key role in this economy. Take social media, for example. There are thousands of robots creating fake accounts, with lots of SMS being sent to activate and serve those fake accounts. On the other side, mobile customers are receiving an unprecedented level of fraudulent phishing (or ‘smishing’ as we call it for SMS) messages with dangerous links.”

To help combat these issues, a lot of organisations are currently working on more holistic, 360-degree solutions which would combine multiple data sources into a data pool to analyse and come out with intelligent identification of possible fraudulent transactions as soon as they’re triggered. 

According to Anurag, by using artificial intelligence and machine learning for fraud prevention, organisations will be able to identify patterns immediately and flag off possible situations of fraud and phishing/smishing. They can then intercept these fraudulent or spurious links, displaying a landing page where a user is notified that it’s possibly a fraudulent page, similar to the warnings users get in the likes of Google Chrome. They will also, then, be able to track and block these fraudulent accounts more quickly, making fraud much harder to commit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dario Betti is CEO of MEF (Mobile Ecosystem Forum) a global trade body established in 2000 and headquartered in the UK with members across the world. As the voice of the mobile ecosystem, it focuses on cross-industry best practices, anti-fraud and monetisation. The Forum provides its members with global and cross-sector platforms for networking, collaboration and advancing industry solutions.  

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