iconectiv Shines Light on How Restoring Trust in Phone Calls and Text is Key for Digital Transformation

What’s the News: At MWC Barcelona 2022, iconectiv will share examples of successful industry initiatives and technologies that are restoring consumer trust in voice calls and text messaging, which is paramount to helping ensure the success of enterprise digital transformation.

Why it Matters: Rebuilding consumer trust in voice calls and text messages — after years of being undermined by illegal robocalls, SMS spam and fraud — is critical to the mobile ecosystem and all the retailers, schools, health care providers and other organizations that depend on it to inform and engage consumers.

Who’s it for: Service providers, businesses, contact center operators, regulators.

Trust is the foundation of communications but it’s hard to come by due to the relentless global scourge of illegal robocalls, spam text and fraud, which costs service providers $29 billion in lost revenues each year. And since fraudulent robocalls are expected to cost consumers $40 billion in 2022, it’s not surprising that they won’t answer calls or texts from phone numbers they don’t recognize. This makes it difficult, expensive and sometimes impossible for hospitals, schools and other legitimate organizations to reach consumers.

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“The industry is working together to make this digital shift effective by diligently working toward rebuilding trust in voice and text communications channels so that legitimate businesses get their calls answered and consumers are once again confident to pick up their phone calls and respond to text messages.”

With companies anticipated to spend $2.8 trillion on digital transformation globally by 2025, regulators, service providers and an ecosystem of vendors are working diligently to help legitimate businesses be known to consumers. They understand that if consumers can’t trust that the caller ID – or that the calling party isn’t who they say they are – it is bad for business, innovation and national growth.

“Digital transformation is changing the way we connect and communicate with each other – from how we work and purchase goods, to how businesses communicate with customers and countries make policy decisions,” said Peter Ford, Executive Vice President, iconectiv. “The industry is working together to make this digital shift effective by diligently working toward rebuilding trust in voice and text communications channels so that legitimate businesses get their calls answered and consumers are once again confident to pick up their phone calls and respond to text messages.”

At MWC Barcelona 2022, iconectiv will showcase the many ways service providers, regulators, trade associations and other industry stakeholders are successfully rebuilding consumer trust in voice calls and text messages, for example:

• The U.S. is the first country to implement the Secure Telephone Identity Revisited/Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (STIR/SHAKEN) framework, which enables service providers to cryptographically sign and verify calling numbers. This helps increase call-answer rates because service providers can give their customers verified Caller ID information. Three months after STIR/SHAKEN was implemented, illegal robocalls already decreased by 29%. The U.K. is among several other countries considering adopting a similar model.
• TruNumber Protect enables service providers to block many types of fraud and suspicious activity by providing a comprehensive database of high-risk and unallocated number ranges. By providing intelligence about telephone numbers worldwide, TruNumber Protect reliably cuts down on many of the top fraud types including Wangari scams, illegal robocalls, smishing and other fraudulent international calls terminating in the U.S.
• 83% of service providers consider having access to the right information at the right time critical to their business. TruOps Common Language ensures that their physical and virtual infrastructure can support all of the new 5G services at scale, as well as the 94 million connections between physical and virtual assets made by Common Language daily.

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For more information, visit iconectiv at Mobile World Congress in Hall 2, Stand 201. iconectiv will be hosting daily “Tech Talks” at 2 PM CET to discuss how iconectiv solutions including STIR/SHAKEN, TruNumber Protect and TruOps Common Language are helping to restore the foundational trust that consumers and businesses rely on when communicating via voice calls or text messages.

In addition, George Cray, Senior Vice President, Products and Services at iconectiv, is participating in the GSMA FinTech Summit: A Token Economy panel “The Rise of Scam Attacks.” It will examine the various attack vectors the industry faces—from illegal robocalls to smishing exploits—and what’s being done to address them.