There’s a question that’s been quietly nagging at the Open Gateway ecosystem for a while now: the supply side of network APIs is largely sorted. Operators are aligned, the APIs are being deployed, distribution partnerships are forming. But who’s going to buy them?
Until now, it’s been hard to answer with any real precision. Which industries are genuinely primed to adopt network APIs? Which ones are enthusiastic in surveys but slow to sign contracts? And which are sitting on huge potential that nobody has quite managed to unlock yet?
To get to the bottom of this, GSMA Intelligence has developed the Open Gateway Demand (OGD) Index, the first index of its kind to score ten industry verticals on their commercial readiness to adopt network APIs. The results make for fascinating, and sometimes surprising, reading.
How the index works
The OGD Index pulls together three pillars to create an overall score out of 100 for each sector. The biggest driver, accounting for 55% of the score, is enterprise demand: how aware businesses and developers are of network APIs, how much they’re already using them, and how strong the appetite is for more. Market opportunity (40%) captures the size and spending potential of each sector. And barriers (5%) provide a useful reality check, flagging where perceived obstacles might slow things down.
The data behind the index is robust. It draws on a GSMA Intelligence enterprise survey covering more than 5,300 senior decision-makers across 32 countries, as well as a separate developer survey spanning 34 countries and over 15 industry verticals. This isn’t guesswork, it’s a genuine read of where the market stands today.
The results: a 20-point gap
The range of scores across the ten sectors tells a clear story. At the top, banking and financial services and media and entertainment both score 79 out of 100. At the bottom, agriculture, forestry and fishing scores 59. That’s a 20-point gap between the most and least ready sectors, significant enough to have real implications for how the Open Gateway ecosystem prioritises its go-to-market efforts.
The full ranking, from highest to lowest, looks like this:
- Banking and financial services: 79
- Media and entertainment: 79
- Healthcare: 76
- Retail: 75
- Manufacturing and industrial: 74
- Transportation and logistics: 74
- Public sector: 73
- Energy and utilities: 67
- Automotive and mobility: 64
- Agriculture, forestry and fishing: 59
The stories behind the scores
What makes the index genuinely useful is that it doesn’t just tell you what, it tells you why. And some of the dynamics are not what you might expect.
Take banking and financial services. It tops the table, but its strength isn’t in market opportunity, scores relatively modestly there. Its dominance comes from enterprise demand. Banks and payments providers have already proven the value of network APIs in real-world deployments, using SIM Swap, KYC Match and Number Verification APIs to fight fraud and streamline customer authentication. Developers know this sector well, and they’re building for it.
Media and entertainment tell a different story. It scores just as highly overall, but it gets there differently, with stronger market opportunity scores driven by high spending propensity and the growing need for quality-assured connectivity for live production and streaming. Broadcasters using network APIs to guarantee the quality of 5G broadcast rigs at live events is a compelling use case that this sector is increasingly waking up to.
Healthcare rounds out the top three, with a score of 76. Its market opportunity score is notably higher than retail or the public sector, likely reflecting demographic tailwinds, as populations age globally, digital healthcare services are growing fast, and so is the need for secure, reliable connectivity to support them.
The surprises
Some findings genuinely stand out. Automotive and mobility scores only 64, near the bottom of the table. For an industry that has arguably been at the forefront of digital transformation for years, this feels counterintuitive. But dig into the data and it becomes clear. Awareness of network APIs and their specific benefits remain surprisingly low in this sector. The potential use cases are obvious, authenticating ride-hailing customers, providing reliable connectivity for automated vehicle systems, enabling remote monitoring but the connection between those needs and what network APIs can deliver hasn’t yet been made clearly enough.
Similarly, the public sector sits seventh overall despite having quite strong enterprise demand scores. The constraint here is market opportunity, specifically, tight budgets. Public sector organisations are interested, but procurement cycles are slow and spending is heavily scrutinised. That’s a structural challenge rather than a lack of appetite.
What this means in practice
For telcos and their distribution partners, the OGD Index is essentially a prioritisation tool. The top-scoring sectors, financial services, media and entertainment, healthcare are where the commercial traction already exists or is closest to materialising. These are the verticals where investment in targeted go-to-market activity is most likely to generate near-term revenue.
But the index also flags where the bigger medium-term opportunities lie. Manufacturing, transport and logistics both score well above 70 overall and have substantial market opportunity scores, yet their enterprise demand is still maturing. That gap represents latent demand waiting to be activated.
More on that and what it takes to unlock it in the next 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.