RCS and Payments

Rich Communication Service (RCS) was first defined around 2007/8 and was taken on by GSMA as the protocol to replace Short Message Service (SMS). RCS required both software and carrier network upgrades, and initially, there was little appetite for adoption, but this is now changing.

While RCS offers more features than improved security over SMS, the focus of this paper is exploring how RCS might address some of the issues with authentication today. Authentication for consumers using online services has been enhanced over time from basic (username and password) to two-factor authentication (2FA), which is most commonly achieved using one-time passwords (OTP). Traditionally, OTP has been implemented on mobile devices using SMS, which has not changed much since it was rolled out in the 1990s and has known weaknesses. Despite this, OTP-overSMS is widely used as an additional factor of authentication, especially in banking. In general, mobile business messages need to be better secured.