Wednesday 10 June, 2026
MWC25 Connect 5G Summit explores the value of Open Gateway APIs across the economy
There is strong and growing demand for standardised network APIs (application programming interfaces) from both enterprises and developers. That was one of the key messages delivered by expert speakers from Microsoft, Toyota Motor Europe, Google and leading mobile operators participating in the Connect 5G Summit, hosted by the GSMA at MWC25.
Focused on the GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative, the Summit’s first session explored how network APIs are creating value across various sectors of the economy, such as the automotive industry and financial services. “The principle of Open Gateway …is really important because that will give us a way to innovate faster, to use the potential of the network much faster as well, and, of course, to ensure that we have a seamless connection,” explained Muriel Desaeger, Technical Head at the R&D centre of Toyota Motor Europe.
Stressing the importance of 5G standalone networks to automakers, she said Toyota has a “very long wish list of services that we want to provide to the drivers” using reliable connectivity. These include recommendations for locations to charge a vehicle, active user sensing to support personalisation “so that your car recognises that it is you and not your husband or wife,” as well as connecting to traffic lights, advanced driver assistance and remote control capabilities.
Robin Cole, VP Engineering at Microsoft, also flagged the value of Open Gateway and API-driven architectures, which she noted “allow rapid scaling of services and flexibility to integrate future technologies, ensuring long-term growth and scalability, as well as enhancing ARPU.”
Better, stronger, faster identity solutions
Experts at the Summit also highlighted the value of Open Gateway’s standardised APIs for identity services to counter fraud and protect privacy. “Why are we using SMS and introducing numbers when it is so subject to fraud and to phishing and automatic attacks etc?” asked David Del Val Latorre Open Gateway Director at Telefónica. “We have better technology now and that technology is Open Gateway, not only the number verification retrieval API, but also all the other APIs around security”, noting that developers and aggregators can build on this multi-dimensional API solution and make it better. Rather than cannibalising operators’ revenues from SMS one-time passwords, this solution will enable operators to save and expand those revenues, he added.
Asked why Open Gateway will work better than past efforts to standardise APIs, David Del Val Latorre said: “This time we have figured out privacy and that is very hard…. We know how in Open Gateway to deal with privacy.” Christiaan Brand, Product Manager: Identity and Security Google, added: “We had very fragmented approaches in the past, perhaps, we had issues around pricing…we had issues around usability of some of these APIs…this is a ten times better solution.”
Stressing that phone number verification is “incredibly important” for Google, he added: “We want applications to be able to acquire a verified phone number directly from a carrier or from a telco. We are bringing that capability to users through Firebase-based phone number verification.”
Building momentum and scale
The availability of blueprints for deployments will help Open Gateway onboard more operators and build further scale, noted Anup Chathoth, Director of Products at T-Mobile. “It’s a better product all-in-all,” he said. “We sell already the bundling of services that together make a much more compelling solution, that’s where a lot of the value is going to come.”
While 106 companies, representing 284 networks covering 78.5% of mobile connections have signed the Open Gateway MoU, Henry Calvert, Head of Networks at the GSMA, cautioned that only 52 networks have so far commercially launched Open Gateway APIs across 27 markets, despite strong demand. He welcomed the rollout of joint ventures, such as Aduna and the Bridge Alliance, which should help build momentum.
Indeed, collaboration is hugely important, noted Johanna Wood, Head of Network API of Vodafone. “We need simplicity, a simple view and a single point of contact for people to come to in order to collaborate. We need to make Vodafone easy and simple for you to collaborate with.”
She described how Vodafone shared data with UK banks to help identify phone calls in which fraudsters could be engaging in social engineering. “We shared the data with our competitors,” to help develop a single consistent solution, Johanna Wood added. “We all built this product together and we took it to the banks, we took it to the finance houses and we are able to offer that protection to the UK market.”
With the proliferation of social engineering and phishing attacks, Eran Haggiag, Founder and CEO, Glide Identity, underlined the importance of robust identity solutions. “As humanity, we are approaching this AGI era, this commoditisation of intelligence, we have to, as a species, upgrade our basic infrastructure and identity is one of the most important infrastructures,” he contended. “How do we differentiate between a person and their deepfake? Today, it is possible to generate videos that look like real people.”
