Over the first two blogs in this series, we’ve looked at which industries score highest on the GSMA Intelligence Open Gateway Demand (OGD) Index, and where the latent demand is that the ecosystem needs to work harder to unlock. But there’s a third dimension to the picture.
Even in sectors where demand is strong and awareness is high, operator revenues from network APIs remain modest. The gap between “enterprises know about and use network APIs” and “telcos are making good money from network APIs” is stubbornly wide. And closing that gap is the next big challenge.
The OGD Index points to three lessons that the Open Gateway ecosystem needs to take seriously. They’re uncomfortable in places, but the data is clear.
Lesson one: Awareness and usage don’t automatically mean revenue
This is perhaps the most important, and most counterintuitive, finding from the index. Several sectors, including retail, healthcare and the public sector, score strongly on the enterprise demand pillar. Awareness is reasonably high. Developers are building with network APIs. Enterprises have indicated intention to spend.
Yet in practice, operator revenues in these sectors remain limited. Why?
The OGD Index points to a consistent pattern across these sectors. Network APIs tend to be consumed tactically rather than strategically, embedded quietly into authentication flows or connectivity assurance processes, rather than procured as visible, standalone services. The value they deliver is real, but it’s diffuse. A fraud prevented here, a smoother login there. That diffuseness makes it hard to attach a clear price tag.
There’s also a structural issue. In many of these sectors, the actual purchasing decision sits with large enterprises or system integrators, which limits operators’ pricing leverage. When a bank or a major retailer is on the other side of the negotiating table, the commercial terms tend to reflect that power dynamic.
The implication is clear. Having a strong API and a willing market isn’t enough on its own. The ecosystem needs pricing models that are explicitly designed around sector economics, not generic API call pricing that treats a banking fraud prevention use case the same as any other API transaction.
Lesson two: Horizontal catalogues need vertical packaging
The Open Gateway initiative has done something genuinely valuable in creating a consistent, standardised framework of network APIs. That horizontal consistency, the ability to access APIs the same way regardless of which operator you’re working with, is a real enabler for developers and enterprises.
But it’s not sufficient on its own for monetisation. A catalogue of capabilities isn’t a product. And the sectors that are most likely to buy network APIs at scale are not the ones browsing a developer portal, they’re the ones who have been shown, concretely, how a specific API solves a specific business problem they already recognise.
This is where vertical-specific packaging becomes essential. Financial services has largely cracked this. SIM Swap and KYC Match have been positioned not as “network APIs” but as fraud-reduction tools that fit naturally into compliance and authentication workflows that banks already have. The industry speaks the language, and the value proposition is clear.
The same logic needs to be applied, with appropriate translation, to every other sector. For retail, it might mean positioning authentication APIs as tools to reduce checkout abandonment and chargebacks. For healthcare, it might mean framing device verification as a patient safety and regulatory compliance tool. For manufacturing and logistics, it might mean showing how QoD-backed connectivity can be built into service level agreements with customers.
The message, the packaging, and even the pricing model needs to be tailored to the way each industry thinks about value, not adapted from a generic telecoms product model.
Lesson three: Price to value, not to cost
This third lesson is perhaps the most structurally significant, and the hardest to implement in practice.
For many advanced network APIs, Quality on Demand, network slicing, edge compute, location-based services, the traditional cost-based pricing approach simply doesn’t work. Setting a price based on network infrastructure costs, and then hoping enterprises see the value, is a losing formula. Enterprises don’t buy infrastructure costs, they buy outcomes.
The sectors that score well on market opportunity in the OGD Index, media and entertainment, manufacturing, transportation and logistics, are unlikely to pay simply for API access. They will pay for guaranteed performance, for assured outcomes, for avoided losses. A broadcaster doesn’t want to pay for a “QoD API call”, they want to pay for certainty that their live stream won’t drop during the final match of a tournament. A logistics company doesn’t want to pay for “location verification”, they want to pay for the ability to guarantee to their customers that a shipment is exactly where they said it would be.
This shift from pricing as a network cost to pricing as a business outcome is already happening in pockets of the market. Microsoft’s deal with Aduna to distribute network APIs as native services via its Azure cloud platform is a good example. When network APIs are embedded in the tools enterprises already use, priced as part of a broader business capability rather than as a standalone telco product, the commercial logic changes entirely.
The challenge for operators and their partners is to build more of these models and to do so with enough urgency to match the pace at which enterprise expectations are evolving.
The bigger picture
Taken together, these three lessons point towards a significant shift in how the Open Gateway ecosystem needs to think about its commercial strategy.
The supply side is largely sorted. The demand signals are real, even if unevenly distributed. The missing piece and the piece that will determine whether network APIs deliver on their commercial promise, is a monetisation approach that is smarter, more targeted and more closely anchored to the value that enterprises experience.
That means flexible business models, revenue sharing, per-feature pricing, outcome-based contracts. It means industry-specific packaging that speaks to the business problems each sector is trying to solve. And it means scale, getting network APIs embedded not just in bespoke operator channels, but in the developer platforms, cloud services and enterprise IT tools that businesses are already using every day.
The OGD Index gives the ecosystem the data it needs to make those choices with confidence. The sectors are ranked. The demand signals are mapped. The barriers are identified. What comes next is execution.
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.