• What’s the News: Today’s announcement by the Secure Telephone Identity Governance Authority (STI-GA) approving the use of Delegate Certificates, paves the way for new tools to deliver trusted calls including expanding the use cases for Registered Caller™, the industry-backed telephone registry from CTIA and iconectiv, supporting voice service providers who choose to use Delegate Certificates when authenticating caller information.

• Why it Matters: Spam and illegal robocalls have caused consumers to stop answering calls from numbers they don’t recognize. This poses a significant challenge for legitimate businesses trying to reach consumers by phone with important or timely updates and information. As a result, there has been a decrease in call-answer rates and customer satisfaction, and an increase in costs.

• Who’s it for: Enterprises, government agencies and non-profit organizations that rely on telephone calls for consumer engagement.

Legitimate businesses that rely on voice calls to reach their customers got a much-needed boost this week following the announcement by the Secure Telephone Identity Governance Authority (STI-GA) that they are expanding the way in which trusted caller information can be established. This new policy change, announced today, expands the SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) protocol to support the use of Delegate Certificates by voice service providers when establishing a customer’s right to use a specific telephone number.

This is the industry’s latest effort to help combat the illegal robocall epidemic and provide options for voice service providers and businesses to work together to effectively distinguish an authentic telephone call from an illegally spoofed one. This announcement comes on the heels of T-Mobile’s use of a Delegate Certificate to complete the first-ever wireless call to include rich call data, which relies on the STIR/SHAKEN framework to indicate that a call is from a trusted source.

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“The industry is focused on stopping illegal robocalls, but we need to be equally focused on making sure the calls from our schools, doctors and companies with which we do business make it to their intended callers”

This policy change also gives voice service providers that plan to use Delegate Certificates when implementing a STIR/SHAKEN framework the opportunity to have business customers register their telephone numbers with Registered Caller™, the nation’s industry-backed centralized telephone number registry. Registering telephone numbers in this centralized registry will help legitimate businesses and other organizations reach consumers more effectively by providing verified caller information that leverages an industry wide, consistent and reliable way to enable the optimal call delivery to the consumer.

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“We are proud of the wireless industry’s collaborative efforts to provide the ecosystem a trusted resource that can help mitigate unwanted robocalls,” said Tom Sawanobori, CTO, CTIA. “This policy update will enhance the work of Registered Caller™ and complements STIR/SHAKEN network integration to ensure legitimate callers are more clearly identified, restoring consumer confidence in voice calls.”

“The industry is focused on stopping illegal robocalls, but we need to be equally focused on making sure the calls from our schools, doctors and companies with which we do business make it to their intended callers,” said Richard Jacowleff, CEO, iconectiv. “That will be possible again thanks to industry initiatives like STIR/SHAKEN and Registered Caller, which provide consumers with trusted information so they can make an informed decision whether or not to answer a call.”

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