The Charter is yet another emerging national framework in Europe governing SMS Push, SMS A2P/P2A, and RCS. Its requirements extend across the entire value chain and will shape daily operations for anyone delivering messaging services into the French market. It comes as multiple countries adopt their own approaches to sender ID governance — from Ireland to Spain, to Finland and we understand Sweden soon— perhaps creating a growing risk of market fragmentation.

AF2M: What It Is and Its Role in the Ecosystem

AF2M (Association Française pour le développement des services et usages Multimédias multiopérateurs) is an industry body formed by French mobile operators and service providers. It is not a government authority but operates as a coregulatory organisation whose codes become contractually binding across operators, aggregators, and service providers.

Members operating across multiple markets must get ready to manage a complex compliance landscape.“

Key Elements

The Charter applies to all actors involved in sending and receiving messages: operators (MNOs/MVNOs), aggregators, intermediaries, technical platforms, and editors. It imposes obligations around:

• Mandatory Know Your Customer / Know Your Traffic vetting checks for each step and players involved in the delivery.
• Clear brand identification for both SMS and RCS.
• Mandatory option for promotional messages, with STOP/CONTACT keywords available through all channels.
• Time windows for promotional messaging (08:00am – 9.30pm)
• Sector-specific restrictions, including bans on specific products/ categories promotional messaging, prohibitions on adult content promotions, and rules for political campaigning.
• No misleading, fraudulent, or impersonation-based messages, and obligations to prevent ambiguity in Sender IDs.
• Governance for sender IDs, will include an AF2M-maintained list of “Interdits sauf autorisation” (Prohibited unless authorised) and “Strictement interdits” (strictly prohibited).

The Charter also introduces specific rules for conversational (two-way) SMS via 09 long numbers, and RCS, ensuring consistent identity and consent requirements across all channels.

A Growing Patchwork

As highlighted in the recent MEF blog on Finland’s Sender ID Registry launching in May 2026 (here), multiple countries are now introducing national variations of sender ID protection. In Finland’s case, the new rules reflect local priorities but add to a proliferating number of incompatible regulatory models across Europe.

In the previous blog, we noted that there seems to be “a growing patchwork of differing frameworks across Europe and the world can create challenges for the ecosystem.” This is now increasingly visible as France joins Ireland, Spain, Singapore, Australia, and others in deploying national sender ID controls — often with differing methods, governance structures, and technical expectations.

Having said that, AF2M’s sender ID model, based on restricted lists managed by operators and the association, differs significantly from registry-based approaches such as those used in Ireland and Finland.

In any case, the implication does not change: Global service providers need to adapt to multiple compliance mechanisms in each country they operate.

Ireland’s early challenges

Despite reaching an incredibly high number of registrants, now very close to the 20k mark, Ireland’s national Sender ID Registry still faces some issues and delays. Legitimate messages from banks, hospitals, and universities were incorrectly labelled as “Likely Scam” due to integration glitches and a two-step registration process that many organisations did not fully complete. Here.

These operational challenges forced the regulator to delay the blocking phase originally planned for October 2025 to a date yet to be specified, citing concerns about consumer confusion, aggregator readiness, and the risk of legitimate messages being rejected.

These examples demonstrate that even well-designed frameworks can disrupt critical communications if implementation is not tightly coordinated. Unfortunately, the devil is often in the details.

Concerns About Global Fragmentation

Industry voices have warned that increasingly prescriptive national controls risk creating “unworkable mandates,” with multiple countries introducing different compliance requirements for sender IDs, identity checks, and traffic filtering. Commentary linked to European regulatory discussions describes this as a “tsunami of SMS regulation” reshaping the A2P ecosystem and potentially increasing operational complexity.