Sinch eyes APAC growth opportunity

Angus Mansfield, SVP Sales and Partnerships APAC at Sinch believes there is a very approachable universal requirement to reach customers where they are on the channels that they want to be communicated with.

Sinch is looking to grow its presence in Asia Pacific as the Swedish-based global communications platform as a service (CPaaS) vendor caters provides mobile, voice and email messaging services to customers globally.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Angus Mansfield, who recently has taken on the role of SVP Sales and Partnerships APAC at Sinch, believes the opportunity for growth in the region is particularly exciting.

“Singapore is our entry point for the Sinch Engage platform at the moment. But the opportunity, especially going into next year, we see is being significant as we start to build out what multi-channel messaging can look like, including RCS, where that's coming into play in Singapore. So, it's an exciting space. We think that there's a lot of opportunity for growth for us,” said Mansfield.

The Sinch Engage platform is designed to help businesses reach customers on multiple messaging platforms. According to Mansfield, the platform supports SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and RCS (which is the new version of SMS).

“The idea is it's a no-code system. It’s something that doesn't bring with it a whole lot of tech investment necessarily, but it can be used by all sorts of teams from sales to marketing to operations to communicate with people in a conversational way across multiple channels. It’s incredibly powerful in that it can be up and running very quickly. And it's a very approachable tool. The adoption is very high because it's made for end users, not made for a technical audience necessarily,” explained Mansfield.

Given the capabilities of the platform, Mansfield believes that there is a very approachable universal requirement to reach customers or reach humans where they are on the channels that they want to be communicated with.

“We think that there's a very broad application. We are seeing a lot of uptakes in retail, in particular. In Southeast Asia, there's a general strength in retail for Sinch as a business, and we see that being definitely the case in Asia as well. There is also a particular strength in financial services and more of the kind of fintech products that are coming out, which relies more on that kind of application to the person messaging side of things,” he added.

Giving customers options

For Mansfield, Sinch is focused on providing a very customer-centric view and has the belief that a company or a customer of Sinch should be able to communicate with their users or their customers in whichever way they want to be communicated with.

According to Sinch’s State of Customer Communications 2025, trust is the new differentiator in communication as only 32% feel comfortable sharing personal preferences with an AI assistant. The report also revealed that 53% of consumers report receiving legitimate brand messages they initially thought were spam.

While 79% say they trust messages more when verified with brand logos or sender IDs, 72% also find AI-powered recommendations helpful, but only when delivered in the right context and channel

“That has us constantly looking at communications and the future of communications in particular. And we did a report on this this year on the future of communication and how from a product perspective and a company perspective, we'll continue to recalibrate and continue to build into the product what we need so that companies can communicate with their users on the channel they want, on whatever device they want,” said Mansfield.

He added that this is also the strategy that Sinch is looking at from a product roadmap perspective.

“I think that the customer-centric view is a real differentiator. We definitely look at things from a customer-centric point of view, and we continuously strive to make sure that our customers can communicate with humans, with people, where and when they want to be communicated with. And I think that demand is growing, like the demand for on-time, accurate, delivered messaging. It's almost an expectation these days. So the demand is growing, and we're putting ourselves constantly in the driver's seat on that stuff,” he said.

Fueling AI demand

Sinch recently also unveiled its predictions for 2026 whereby the CPaaS vendor believes the convergence of conversational messaging and GenAI is creating an explosion in communication volume. Specifically, Sinch predicts that AI agents for both businesses and consumers will create entirely new categories of interaction, redefining engagement models, and forcing companies to redesign their communication frameworks for scale, context, and trust.

Interestingly, when asked about how Sinch is leveraging AI, Mansfield explained that while Sinch sees AI as an opportunity and an incredibly powerful technology, there’s still a human somewhere who still needs to be communicated with.

Looking at some of the strategic partnerships Sinch has, Mansfield pointed out that the company is now embarking on incredibly powerful, agentic companies who can do all sorts of work at the backend.

“At some point, they need to communicate with a human; they need that last mile, and that's where we are incredibly effective at connecting an AI platform to a human. And that obviously fits all sorts of different use cases, from healthcare to tradesman appointments to other use cases. We have a real focus on this so that we are helping the AI companies who are going to be generating a whole lot more use cases and traffic that needs to be delivered somewhere, and that's where we step in,” said Mansfield.

Working with ecosystem partners

One of Sinch’s strengths is also the capability to leverage its strategic partnerships. Currently, Sinch has had really good success with HubSpot which has also been one of the major ways they’ve launched into the Singapore market.

“We've launched into the Singapore market off the back of our HubSpot relationship. We are an essential app with HubSpot, which means we're endorsed more or less. And we handle a lot of messaging through them. And there's an ecosystem that surrounds that in terms of HubSpot partners, which is super important to us as well, where we can go in and create customer impact as HubSpot and Sinch Engage, two platforms delivered through a HubSpot service partner,” said Mansfield.

“That ecosystem is incredibly, incredibly important and incredibly powerful. We have over 85 tech stack integrations through Sinch Engage. So, whilst HubSpot is a great example of one that's working incredibly well, it's a very diverse product. And we believe that from an integration perspective, that's also one of our strengths,” he added.

Recognized as an Essential App in the HubSpot marketplace and a certified co-innovation partner, Sinch is already shaping the future of customer engagement with HubSpot’s ecosystem. By combining AI and rich messaging, with deep HubSpot integration, Sinch Engage empowers growth-focused businesses to connect with customers at scale through trusted, personalized communications.

Apart from HubSpot, Sinch is also partnering with NetSuite, Zoho, Microsoft and a bunch of other partners.

“With Sinch Engage being kind of central to that communication piece and then integrating with some of these other applications, that's where some of the power comes in because we can do the delivery. We integrate from an interface perspective as an example in HubSpot, where we actually integrate with HubSpot Conversations inbox. So, Sinch handles the delivery and then it's actually driven out of HubSpot as a platform,” explained Mansfield.

With that said, Mansfield believes that Sinch offers a very high level of reliability and trust.

“We strive constantly to help companies communicate with users wherever they are, on whatever device they're on. So, I think that's a very powerful way for a partner to create an impact on their customers. And I think when you combine the technology platform that we have with our incredibly good connections from a telco perspective and our incredibly high deliverability rates and the trust that we have and that we've built into our platform, we become a very compelling way for a channel partner to be able to provide impact to their customers,” he concluded.