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Mobile operators will generate $27 billion from the termination of SMS messages related to multi-factor authentication in 2022. This will be an increase from $25 billion in 2021, a report said on Tuesday.

According to Juniper Research, it is predicted that this 5 per cent growth will be driven by increased pressure on digital service providers to offer secure authentication that reduces the risk of data breaches and protects user identity.

"Automating traffic detection is crucial for operators as we expect multi-factor authentication traffic to grow to 2.1 billion messages by 2027," Keith Breed, co-author of the research, said in a statement.

"SMEs have typically not invested in messaging for security in the past. However, rising pressure to implement greater security for users will drive adoption amongst SMEs over the next 5 years, and increase global traffic," Breed added.

Multi-factor authentication combines multiple credentials to verify a user or transaction. This includes sending an SMS that contains a one-time password or code to a user's unique phone number.

The new research urges operators to capitalise on the growth in demand for multi-factor authentication SMS traffic, by leveraging firewalls to monitor and identify SMS traffic specifically used for multi-factor authentication.

The operators then will be able to charge a premium on this traffic and further increase business messaging revenue.

The research predicts there will be over 1.7 trillion multi-factor authentication messages delivered globally in 2022; representing 60 per cent of the total SMS business messaging traffic.

Operators must develop machine learning algorithms that automate the monitoring of this vast amount of traffic to efficiently identify messages that can be charged at a premium.