The Next Chapter of A2P Messaging at Twilio

Messaging has become a cornerstone for companies and organizations to digitally engage with their customers and audiences. As the pioneer of business messaging, we at Twilio take pride in our role in advocating for our customers and end users in the messaging ecosystem. But in recent years, SPAM, fraud, and non-compliant messages has greatly increased, and the messaging industry has had to respond.

The wireless carriers in partnership with industry leaders, including Twilio, developed solutions to protect end users and the organizations that interact with them. During the last few years many of you have heard from us about the transition to A2P. Throughout this journey, Twilio has partnered with carriers and other ecosystem players to make sure these changes accommodate the needs of the industry to remove unwanted messaging, while ensuring that the transition is manageable for the brands that rely on messaging engagement.

The requirement to register 10DLC traffic has been mandatory throughout the U.S. telecommunications ecosystem for a number of years. This move towards greater transparency is intended to achieve a fully verified messaging ecosystem where all sending organizations are known. While this process has taken several years, the transition registration period is coming to an end, and all senders must register their traffic as A2P. Businesses and organizations who fail to register their A2P messaging traffic risk incurring significant filtering, increased penalty fees and even finding their communications blocked. For Twilio customers, we will phase in the gradual blocking of unregistered 10DLC traffic starting July 5, 2023, in order to assist and support customers to register their A2P campaigns before unregistered messages are fully blocked on August 31st, 2023.

Partnering to create a better messaging ecosystem

As the industry evolves towards more rigorous compliance through sender transparency, our position and role in improving and innovating within the ecosystem has not changed – trusted and verified messaging is the key to successful customer engagement.

Through collaboration and shared responsibility, Twilio, the carriers and our customers, are embarking on this journey of messaging compliance together. This partnership starts with brand, campaign, and traffic transparency. Twilio, along with our carrier partners, are advocating for the health and success of A2P messaging and the need to have greater visibility into who is sending their traffic through the ecosystem. In a recent conversational messaging study, we found that only 65% of consumers and end users actually trust the brands they interact with. Therefore, to fully achieve this trusted and transparent ecosystem, all U.S. sender types (10DLC, toll-free, and short codes) and campaigns must be registered and verified.

We understand that this shift towards compliance has come with developmental and administrative hurdles for our customers, especially those managing thousands of numbers and sending high volumes of messaging traffic. However, throughout the last two years, with the introduction of A2P 10DLC and toll-free verification requirements, Twilio has invested in our APIs and software solutions to provide programmatic ways for businesses and developers to register and manage their messaging traffic, campaigns, and brands to expedite this process. We believe that by better protecting this high-engagement channel from unwanted messaging, our customers will see drastic benefits such as lower filtering which will lead to an increased ROI on their messaging solution.

We recognize that this improved experience requires changes from everyone. We continuously work with ecosystem partners, and actively advocate for the developers and businesses and organizations that are sending safe, legal and wanted messages.

Every developer and every business and organization building with Twilio is at a different stage in their messaging and compliance journey. As these industry changes come, we are here to support you. If you are a customer, please look out for communications coming from our team.