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Twilio Announces General Availability of Rich Communication Services (RCS) to Transform Business Messaging with Branded, Interactive Experiences

via Business Wire

RCS Powers Branded and Verified Messages with Rich Media for Enhanced Customer Trust and Engagement Underpinned by the Twilio Platform

Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today's leading brands, today announced the general availability of Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging globally. Twilio's RCS enables brands to send branded, verified messages with rich interactive features— marking the biggest leap in business messaging since SMS. Following the public beta launch last year, RCS is now available to all 349k+ active customer accounts through Twilio's Programmable Messaging and Verify APIs. Existing customers are able to upgrade with no code changes and new customers can implement both SMS and RCS through a single integration via the Twilio platform.

"Building engagement with your customers should be as seamless and trusted as possible," said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer and Head of R&D at Twilio. "RCS makes this a reality by delivering richer interactions, improved deliverability, increased trust in your brand. This represents a fundamental shift in how businesses can communicate with their customers through Twilio's trusted, simple, and smart platform."

Key RCS Capabilities with Twilio

  • Branded Messaging: Automatically upgrades SMS messages to RCS on capable devices at no additional cost for basic messages up to 160 characters, with business logos, taglines, and trusted sender verification by Google.
  • Rich Content and Interactive Features: Enables call-to-action buttons, interactive carousels, location sharing, and rich media content that drive higher engagement and conversion rates.
  • Seamless Integration Simple configuration through the Twilio Console with automatic carrier management.
  • SMS Fallback: Twilio’s platform automatically detects when RCS is unavailable and seamlessly falls back to SMS, ensuring reliable message delivery without any additional configuration.

Branded Messaging Drives Customer Trust

With messaging fraud reaching epidemic proportions1 and consumer skepticism at an all-time high, branded communications, along with real-time personalization, have become essential for building customer trust. According to Twilio’s 2025 State of Customer Engagement Report, while 90% of consumers trust at least some brands, just 15% “absolutely” trust them with their data. Additionally, 88% of consumers are more likely to buy when engagement is personalized in real time—but only 44% of brands say they’re executing at that level.

RCS can help address this trust gap by ensuring customers always know who they are communicating with through verified company branding, business logos, and trusted verification badges. This makes RCS particularly valuable for transactional communications like order confirmations and delivery updates, marketing campaigns with rich media content, and customer service interactions requiring quick replies- all areas where brand trust and engagement are critical. Through Twilio's platform, this can enhance trust and translate into measurable business results, as businesses using RCS experience a 32% increase in customer engagement and conversion rates compared to traditional SMS messaging, according to a recent study by Futurum Research.

Global Enterprise Adoption Across Industries

Existing Twilio Messaging customers can upgrade to RCS without code changes, adding an additional channel option alongside SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp, while new customers can implement both SMS and RCS messaging through a single API integration. Twilio manages registration and onboarding with carriers, device capability checks, and provides automatic fallback to SMS when RCS is not available, ensuring reliable message delivery for any business at any scale.

"The significance and potential of RCS goes beyond just uplift – the capability will help reshape business messaging into an interactive, trusted, and transaction-ready channel. What was once a one-way notification system is becoming a two-way enriched workflow – one where payments, authentication, and service requests can be completed without leaving a messaging app. For businesses, this means faster transactions, lower customer effort, and new opportunities to drive loyalty, revenue and better experiences. Zero-code setup and built-in SMS fallback capabilities are important in helping businesses overcome common adoption hurdles, including rollout and integration complexities, to ensuring messages can still be received even if RCS isn’t supported,” said Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst at Omdia.

Following Apple's support for RCS on iPhones starting with iOS 18.2 in December 2024, Twilio's RCS messaging is now available globally across 20+ countries and 55+ carriers. This expanded reach across both major mobile platforms positions RCS for widespread enterprise adoption, with customers like Nova Gestões in Latin America, and Fresha in Europe already leveraging RCS to enhance their customer communications.

Businesses ready to transform their customer engagement with branded, interactive messaging can get started with RCS through the Twilio Console today.

About Twilio

Today's leading companies trust Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way. Across 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information about Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), visit: www.twilio.com.

Supporting Customer/Partner Quote Sheet

"We think a new paradigm is emerging where the most valued real estate of the smartphone is no longer the homepage, but the inbox,” said Steve Brough, Global GTM Head, RCS for Business at Google. “Through our partnership with Twilio, businesses can now deliver branded, verified experiences that blur the line between what a message can do and what an app can do, ultimately letting users get tasks done faster and more efficiently."

“We’re here to make life easier for salon owners, putting their needs front and center in everything we design,” said Jeremy Miller, Head of Product at Fresha. “When messages come from a verified, recognisable Fresha brand, people engage more because they know it’s genuine. That trust leads to stronger relationships and better outcomes.”

“Businesses in Singapore must adapt to the evolving expectations of consumers who are seeking more immersive interactions, especially through their mobile devices. Our partnership with Twilio, enables businesses in Singapore to tap on RCS messaging to deliver rich and interactive communications that can improve their engagement with their customers in new and exciting ways,” said Terence Lai, VP of Digitalisation, Products and Partnerships at Singtel.

“RCS through Twilio has transformed how we engage with our customers. With RCS, we’ve seen a 4x improvement in response rates compared to SMS,” said Juliano Skrzyszowski, CTO at Nova Gestões. “Most importantly, the branded verification gives our customers confidence they’re communicating with Nova Gestões directly. In our business of financial recovery, trust is everything and RCS delivers that trust from the first message.”

1 Federal Trade Commission, "New FTC Data Show Top Text Message Scams of 2024; Overall Losses to Text Scams Hit $470 Million," April 2025.

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