PTA has proposed a significant regulatory intervention in Pakistan’s corporate messaging market, calling for Corporate SMS to be formally declared a distinct telecommunications market and signalling that it may designate all Cellular Mobile Operators as entities with Significant Market Power in this segment. The proposal, if formalised, would reshape the enterprise messaging landscape in Pakistan and could directly reduce the cost burden that banks, financial technology companies, and service providers face when sending transactional messages such as one-time passwords, transaction alerts, and public service notifications to their customers.
The regulatory push stems from mounting complaints filed by banks, fintechs, and enterprise service providers who argue that mobile operators charge excessive tariffs for Corporate SMS delivery while using the same network infrastructure that carries ordinary consumer text messages. The discrepancy between the cost structure of delivering these messages and the prices being charged to corporate clients has been driving up operational costs across the financial sector, with fintechs in particular flagging the issue as a barrier to affordable digital financial service delivery. PTA’s assessment of the market acknowledges that Corporate SMS occupies a specialised and captive position: it serves as the backbone of authentication and notification systems across banking and digital services, and cannot easily be replaced by alternatives such as WhatsApp Business or email, which require smartphones, application installations, and active internet access that millions of Pakistanis do not consistently have.
The regulatory rationale for the Significant Market Power designation rests on what PTA describes as a termination monopoly. Under standard telecom competition rules, an operator holds Significant Market Power when it controls more than 25 percent of a market. In the case of Corporate SMS termination, however, PTA argues that each mobile operator controls 100 percent of message delivery to its own subscribers, since no competitor or third-party aggregator can bypass the operator to reach that network’s users without a commercial connectivity agreement. Third-party Short Message Service aggregators and licensed service providers are entirely dependent on these operators, giving each Cellular Mobile Operator exclusive control over a captive segment of the Corporate SMS delivery market that cannot be circumvented through alternative routing.
To build the evidentiary foundation for its case, PTA has issued a directive requiring all mobile operators to submit audit-certified data covering the period from January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2025, detailing average SMS rates and revenue figures across three categories: banking transactional messages, marketing campaigns, and other enterprise services. If PTA proceeds to formalise the Significant Market Power declaration on the basis of this data, it would gain the regulatory authority to directly intervene in Corporate SMS tariff structures, setting access price ceilings or mandating reference interconnection offers that would reduce wholesale costs for enterprise clients across Pakistan’s financial and digital services sectors.
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