The global market for advanced services based on mobile context insights, where mobile operators trade subscriber data with brands, could be worth as much as $44bn (£26.5bn) annually by 2017. So says Syniverse, which believes that, in the future, evolved and highly personalized mobile context insights may be worth even more, depending on consumers’ willingness to opt in and engage.

The figure is based on a report commissioned by Syniverse and carried out by economists at Strategic Economic Engineering Corp (SEEC), which values the market for operators providing services to brands based on end-user context data and proposes a sustainable long-term market structure with balanced, mutual benefit between operators, brands and consumers.

Syniverse describes mobile context as the insight into subscriber information, behaviour and location that is available to operators and that can be offered to brands for the purpose of improving customer engagement and experience. The economists at SEEC worked with Syniverse to model and value the mobile context opportunity and identified two distinct markets – context by geo-segment and context by individual.

Context by geo-segment relates to operators providing information about anonymous subscribers in specific locations to brands targeting precise geo-markets. The value of this model is calculated to be up to $44bn to mobile operators annually.

Context by individual relates to operators offering highly specific individual subscriber data to a single brand partner to provide tailored offers or information. Syniverse says the varying characteristics of particular vertical markets complicate the valuation of this market overall, but that the opportunity may be worth even more than the context-by-geo-segment market. It says that calculations around a single use case – location-based fraud prevention services, where, for example, a credit card transaction in a foreign country may be declined if the cardholder’s phone does not show them as being in the same country – suggest a global opportunity for operators of $3bn annually.

Talking to Mobile Marketing, Syniverse CMO, Mary Clarke, admitted that the complexity of getting data out of operators and sharing it with brands is a challenge, but noted that the company has 25 years’ experience bridging these gaps.

“Over that time, we have played this role of bringing the critical mass of operators together to solve problems like roaming and inter-carrier SMS, bringing parties to one common platform,” she said. “We are at the beginning of this road to identify the opportunity going forward. Operators have an incredible amount of insight on their subscribers’ location and behaviour that they can make available to brands looking to reach consumers through mobile for conversion to a revenue event or increased brand loyalty, which is what brands are looking to achieve.”