It's the online routine known to many of today's travelers. You power up an app such as Booking.com, find the desired destination and choose flights, hotels, car hire and other sundries from the convenience of one site. But what if the same app allowed you to select a low-cost mobile roaming deal without having to change your phone or normal provider?

Until quite recently, the subscriber identity module (SIM) card inside a phone made this impossible. Users outside the telecom industry are familiar with these as centimeter-long strips of plastic and circuitry, easily dropped into a mug of tea or lost in household clutter after removal. Replacing them in a traditional handset was always necessary to switch provider. But later smartphones now include an embedded SIM, or eSIM. And while they cannot be ejected, they can be reconfigured. In theory, that means a customer can flit between operators without changing the phone or its hardware.

This has all sorts of troubling ramifications for mobile network operators (MNOs), effectively turning the smartphone into a storefront for different connectivity vendors. But it's also seen as a potentially lucrative opportunity by companies such as BICS. A subsidiary of Belgian telco Proximus, BICS functions partly as an international carrier, an intermediary that facilitates the wholesale roaming and interconnect arrangements between dozens of the world's MNOs.

For years, BICS has also been targeting enterprise customers that have network needs, including the mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that rent capacity from those MNOs. In the market for travel eSIMs, though, BICS would operate not as mobile virtual network enabler but instead as a kind of supranational MVNO for others. Early next year, it plans to launch what it calls a "SIM applet" that would instantaneously connect a phone customer to the most optimal network in any country, using a technology called multi-IMSI (for multiple international mobile subscriber identities).

Hoping for a different kind of blockbuster

Hence a new BICS initiative, the travel eSIM partner program, aimed at the likes of Booking.com. "They don't want to become an MVNO, they just want to offer a product," said Gabriel Salvate, head of customer solutions and presales for BICS. "It's a turnkey solution. They don't need to do a lot – just say, 'how can I integrate this in my portal, how will the SIM be generated?' – and then we do everything for them. So that's the main idea here."

BICS can already show off a customer in Carrefour, the French retailer, which announced a BICS-powered "Carrefour eSIM travel data" service in June. The operator is now in discussions with various travel agencies and online marketplace companies such as GetYourGuide, a startup based in Berlin. "We're targeting companies that can generate more than 100,000 SIMs a year," said Salvate. "If you have ten companies, you have a million devices connected." The launch of the applet next year should make the whole process much smoother for clients and their own customers.

Research carried out last year by Kaleido Intelligence has buoyed expectations, predicting that travel eSIM spend will soar fivefold over the 2023 to 2028 period. This would value the market at about $10 billion and mean it accounts for more than 80% of all travel SIM spend. But this all sounds like yet another non-traditional threat to the MNOs that BICS also counts as customers. After all, the goal of any consumer would be to cut the roaming fees incurred on the domestic provider's service.

Salvate's immediate response is to mention Blockbuster, the VHS tape and then DVD rentals company whose stores were sucked empty by Netflix and the phenomenon of video streaming. "It's quite similar," he said. "They need to adapt themselves and understand customer behavior."

Perhaps the biggest danger is that a BICS-like travel offer raises consumer awareness of eSIMs and their convenience, leading customers to switch regularly between providers to suit their needs. For now, contractual arrangements would seem like an obvious barrier to such disruptive behavior. And a travel eSIM would appear to hold little benefit in the European Union, where regulations have already scrapped roaming fees paid by customers.

Big Tech onslaught

But it is not hard to see how eSIMs could be a major opportunity for companies pursuing an MVNO model, and there is some fear they may be joined by the Big Tech players in future. The likes of Apple and Amazon already have much stronger consumer-facing brands than any telco does. They could easily package connectivity in a bundle of services, including music, video and free deliveries. No?

Salvate, of course, is aware of all the "discussions" but downplays more talk of threats to MNOs. "There are a few important things like infrastructure," he said. "Who is going to handle that at the end of the day? This is where the MNOs are in charge. They will not transfer this to others." The customer support and other services offered by network operators will be just as critical in ensuring their continued relevance, he thinks.

BICS is no stranger to disruption. Roaming revenues have been under regulatory attack for years, prompting diversification into areas such as digital identity, fraud management and communications platform as a service (or CPaaS). The "international segment" of Proximus to which BICS now belongs registered a 13.3% year-over-year increase in sales for the recent second quarter, to €415 million (US$462 million), but said revenues were down 5.3% on a pro forma basis, blaming a CPaaS shift from SMS-only to "lower-margin" omnichannel services. If nothing else, the travel eSIMs move shows BICS is not standing still.