APIs to Bring More Than Half of Mobile Identity Revenue by 2029

A new study from Juniper Research predicts that global revenue from mobile identity application programming interfaces (APIs) will reach $22 billion in 2029, rising from $2.4 billion in 2025. This significant growth over the next four years will be driven by increasing support for network APIs that silently authenticate users through operator networks rather than over SMS.

The study identified a suite of emerging ‘verification APIs’ as being set to disrupt established mobile identity solutions, such as one-time passwords (OTPs), over the next four years. Specifically, it predicts that APIs that compare the phone number used during sign-up with the phone number accessing the mobile network will be the key use case for API growth in mobile identity.

Juniper Research predicts that the increased security offered by this API, such as spoofing mitigation, will deliver greater value for digital service providers than SMS-based authentication. To ensure API growth is sustainable, the report recommends that mobile identity vendors implement rate limits to the number of API calls that can be requested by users, to avoid fraudulent use of APIs.

“APIs are now comparable in price to SMS, however, the additional security provided by APIs alone provides enough of a value proposition to encourage enterprises to rapidly migrate mobile identity traffic,” remarked research author Georgia Allen.