Chema Alonso, Chief Digital Officer of Telefonica, has made several announcements at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025 in Barcelona.
Telefonica has closed deals with more than 50 large companies around the world and is negotiating a growing number of new contracts with more companies for adopting Open Gateway APIs to improve the digital services they offer to their customers.
Telefonica has the support of more than 20 commercial partners for Open Gateway deployment.
Telefonica and TikTok, the leading mobile short-video form platform, have started collaboration during MWC 2024 to design onboarding process, based on the ‘Number Verification’ API. This solution will allow TikTok users to register to the app using their mobile phone number, without the need for an SMS or a third-party verification system. The ‘Number Verification’ solution will be launched in Brazil during the first half of 2025, and it will be extended to strategic markets for both companies.
TikTok and Telefonica have also announced plans to collaborate on a new API named “Age Verification” within the CAMARA framework (an open source project developed by the GSMA and the Linux Foundation to standardise and expose APIs), that will integrate key functionalities from other widely adopted solutions like ‘Number Verification’ and ‘KYC’ (Know-Your-Customer). This new API would be designed to provide age signals to supplement TikTok’s existing age assurance and age confirmation measures.
Telefonica said Cabify will start using the Number Verification API in its registration processes. This will allow Cabify users to register directly, without having to receive an SMS or use another third-party verification system, which slows down the process.
Digitalisation of the Community of Madrid (Spain) will associate with Telefonica to use Open Gateway APIs in the public administration, with the aim of optimising its internal processes to become more agile and responsive to the needs of the people of Madrid.
Amazon Web Services and Telefonica announced the joint creation of an innovation centre for new SaaS consumer products for telcos that combine the strengths of the cloud with those of telecommunications networks.
The collaboration will be based on Telefonica’s experience in the management of telecommunications data and algorithms to analyse this data and obtain anonymous and aggregated information from consumers to serve different verticals.
AWS will provide infrastructure and data storage, data governance and analytics services to enable the development of modern management platforms, generative AI applications and data analytics based on the cloud and adapted to telecommunications data.
Telefonica is partnering with Google Cloud to integrate Open Gateway into Google Firebase, a platform with over 3 million developers that offers a suite of cloud tools and services including authentication services. Both companies will work on incorporating the phone number verification service enabled through Open Gateway APIs, Christiaan Brand from Google said.
Other operators including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, and Telenor are also working on enabling this service, and more are expected to join in the coming months. The goal is to have the service commercially available before the end of the year.
TelecomLead.com News Desk
