In the first blog in this series, we looked at the headline findings from the GSMA Intelligence Open Gateway Demand (OGD) Index, the first data-driven ranking of ten industry verticals by their readiness to adopt network APIs. Banking and financial services came out on top, and the results flagged a clear 20-point gap between the most and least commercially ready sectors.
Headline rankings only tell part of the story. What the OGD Index also reveals, and what is arguably just as important for the future of the Open Gateway ecosystem, is where significant demand exists but hasn’t yet been converted into actual deployments. In other words, where is the latent demand, and what will it take to unlock it?
The answer points to three areas in particular: retail, healthcare and the public sector on one hand, and manufacturing, transport and logistics on the other. Then the third presents another challenge, the awareness gap that is holding back sectors like automotive and agriculture from even getting started.
Learning from financial services
One of the clearest patterns in the OGD Index is that retail, healthcare and the public sector all score strongly on enterprise demand. They know about network APIs. Their developers are using them. But they haven’t yet achieved the commercial scale that financial services has managed, partly because of tighter budgets, partly because the compelling use cases haven’t been packaged and presented in a way that drives action.
The good news is that the path forward is reasonably clear. These sectors are watching what’s worked in banking and payments, and they’re starting to apply similar logic to their own challenges.
SIM Swap, KYC Match and Number Verification APIs, the workhorses of fraud prevention in financial services, translate directly to retail, healthcare and the public sector applications. Online retailers face significant fraud losses on high-value transactions. Healthcare providers need to verify the identity of patients accessing digital services. Government departments want to ensure that people accessing sensitive records like vaccination histories or tax filings are who they say they are.
The technology is proven. The use cases are real. What’s needed now is the commercial packaging that makes it straightforward for organisations in these sectors to adopt, ideally bundled within broader security or authentication contracts rather than positioned as standalone API purchases.
The Carrier Billing API is another opportunity that these sectors are beginning to explore, offering consumers alternative payment mechanisms that don’t rely on card infrastructure. For retailers, this could open new customer segments and reduce transaction friction.
One specific finding from the developer survey stands out here: 70% of developers affiliated with the healthcare industry who have deployed a network API have worked directly with mobile operators, the highest figure of any sector, compared with an average of 45% across all verticals. That’s a strong signal that the foundational relationships are already in place. Healthcare isn’t waiting for permission, it’s already building.
The manufacturing and logistics opportunity
If the retail, healthcare and the public sector story is about following in the footsteps of financial services, the manufacturing, transport and logistics story is about a different kind of opportunity entirely, one that’s bigger, harder to reach, and not yet properly activated.
Both manufacturing, and transportation and logistics, score well above 70 on the OGD Index overall, and both have strong market opportunity scores. These are large industries with significant spending power and a genuine need for the kinds of capabilities that network APIs can deliver. But their enterprise demand scores are more modest, which suggests that while the opportunity is clearly there, these sectors haven’t yet fully grasped how network APIs can transform their operations.
The Quality on Demand (QoD) API is perhaps the most obvious near-term opportunity here. Think about a port authority wanting to deploy drones to inspect cranes and infrastructure remotely. They need guaranteed connectivity to stream video reliably from those drones in real time. The QoD API can provide exactly that assurance, not just best-effort connectivity but a confirmed quality of service for that specific use case, at that specific time and location.
Or consider a transportation company that uses freelance drivers during peak periods. Network APIs can be used to verify the identity of those drivers quickly and reliably, reducing onboarding friction while maintaining security.
Location-based APIs, including Location Verification, Location Retrieval and Geofencing Subscription, are another natural fit for these sectors. Any business that needs to continuously monitor the whereabouts of vehicles, goods or equipment across a wide geographic area stands to benefit enormously. And in manufacturing, the ability to integrate connectivity assurance into automated production lines and logistics flows could deliver real efficiency gains at scale.
The size and economic importance of these industries means they deserve to be a priority for the Open Gateway ecosystem. Getting them from latent demand to active deployment should be one of the defining challenges of 2026.
Closing the awareness gap
The third challenge that the OGD Index highlights is a different kind of problem. In some sectors, it’s not that demand is latent, it’s that awareness is genuinely low.
Automotive and mobility and agriculture both score in the lower half of the index, and the data suggests this is less about lack of appetite and more about lack of knowledge. These industries simply haven’t been exposed sufficiently to the case for network APIs.
That’s a solvable problem but it requires a different kind of intervention. It’s not about pricing or packaging; it’s about education and demonstration. Telcos and their partners need to make the benefits concrete and tangible for decision-makers in these sectors who may never have considered network APIs as part of their digital strategy.
The connections are there to be made. Automotive companies are already deeply invested in vehicle automation and connected mobility, the QoD API and location-based services could significantly accelerate those ambitions, from remote vehicle management to connected infrastructure. Farmers operating large-scale precision agriculture are already grappling with connectivity challenges across wide, often remote areas, and location and device management APIs could give them capabilities they currently have no straightforward way to access.
The expectation is that awareness in these sectors will naturally grow as adjacent industries, particularly transport and logistics, begin to demonstrate the value of network APIs in practice. Spillover effects are real. But the ecosystem shouldn’t rely on organic discovery alone.
The common thread
Across all three of these areas, the sectors learning from financial services, the large industrial verticals with unmet needs, and the awareness-gap sectors, the common thread is that the demand exists or can be created. The question is whether the Open Gateway ecosystem moves smartly enough, to meet it.
That brings us to the final challenge: monetisation. Being aware of demand, and knowing how to turn it into revenue, are two very different things. We’ll look at that in the final blog in this series.
The GSMA Intelligence Open Gateway Demand Index is based on enterprise and developer surveys conducted across 32 and 34 countries respectively in 2025. Download the full report at GSMA Intelligence.