Brazil’s two major operators Claro and Vivo are jointly pushing the adoption of RCS Rich Communication Services, yet their implementation strategies differ significantly. RCS will act as a complementary channel to traditional A2P‑SMS to carry part of marketing and enterprise customer relationship management traffic, but it will not fully replace SMS in the short term.
Vivo positions RCS as its primary channel for sending promotional messages to subscribers and has achieved stronger user engagement results. Anderson Fontes, A2P Messaging Coordinator at Vivo, states the operator is upgrading RCS to support long text, PDFs and multimedia assets for enterprise CRM use cases. It continues monitoring market feedback and expands RCS commercial opportunities through gradual, organic evolution.
Claro follows a more cautious phased migration approach. It continuously tracks operational metrics, selects use cases with the strongest RCS performance, and has completed integration with the Google Search ecosystem. Claro also notes that low consumer P2P RCS penetration and enterprises’ existing reliance on WhatsApp paired with limited RCS awareness are key barriers to adoption.
Both operators forecast that RCS and SMS will coexist long-term. Operators will migrate selected use cases to RCS while keeping SMS channels available. RCS will be prioritised for scenarios where SMS delivers poor performance. Wholesale APIs are opened to aggregators, gradually diverting marketing traffic from traditional A2P‑SMS.
