APIs to lead mobile identity market with $22bn revenue by 2029

11 Mar 2025

A Juniper Research study reveals that global revenue from mobile identity application programming interfaces (APIs) is set to soar, reaching $22bn by 2029, up from $2.4bn in 2025. The surge in growth is largely driven by the growing shift towards network APIs, which enable seamless authentication through operator networks, moving away from the reliance on SMS for user verification.

Source: Freepik

Mobile identity services authenticate users’ identities in sectors such as banking, healthcare, and online retail by leveraging a mobile subscriber’s phone number through messaging or API calls.

The value of identity APIs lies in their security

The study highlights the rise of emerging ‘verification APIs’, which are set to challenge traditional mobile identity solutions like one-time passwords (OTPs) in the coming years. These new APIs, which compare the phone number used during sign-up with the phone number accessing the mobile network, are predicted to be the key driver behind the expected API growth in mobile identity.

Juniper Research forecasts that the enhanced security offered by these APIs—such as spoofing mitigation—will provide greater value to digital service providers than SMS-based authentication. To sustain API growth, the report recommends that mobile identity vendors implement rate limits on the number of API calls users can make to prevent fraudulent use of these technologies.

Georgia Allen, the report's author, remarked: "APIs are now comparable in price to SMS; however, the additional security provided by APIs alone provides enough of a value proposition to encourage enterprises to migrate mobile identity traffic rapidly."

An extract from the new report, Global Mobile Identity Market 2025-2029, is available for free download.