How Verified Caller Identity Gets Answered

Your phone rings. The screen shows an unknown number or “spam likely.” Do you pick up, or do you protect yourself and ignore it? That split-second decision has become the default for millions of people, and it’s crushing legitimate communication from banks, healthcare providers, insurers, and service teams that genuinely need to reach customers.

From the Enterprise Connect show floor, we talk with Nick Moss from TransUnion’s communications product team about how the voice channel lost trust and how to earn it back. We get into verified caller identity, branded caller ID, and the real-world impact of call authentication built on STIR/SHAKEN principles. The conversation breaks down why spoofing is so easy, what it takes to vet enterprises, and how carriers can help deliver clear identity at scale so a legitimate call looks legitimate when it matters most.

We also explore practical outcomes across industries: fewer missed pharmacy and provider calls, faster resolution for financial services alerts, and stronger defenses against fraudsters who target contact centers as well as consumers. If you care about robocalls, phone spoofing, call labeling, and the future of trusted telephony, this one connects the dots with concrete examples and a clear direction forward.

If you find this helpful, subscribe, share it with someone fighting “spam likely” fatigue, and leave a review with your biggest question about trusted calling and caller ID verification.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

And we're here at Enterprise Connect with Nick from TransUn. Nick, how are you? I'm doing well. Doing well. Great to see you here at Enterprise Connect. We're talking all things voice and telephony and more. Transcom is a company that's been around, has a long storied history in this industry. How do you describe yourselves these days?

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Yeah, yeah. So TransUnion overall, you you think of your credit score. Right. Right. That's sort of the first thing. And I've even had people at this conference ask if I can uh if I can if I can help them with their credit score. Can you? And I cannot, sorry. But we we are part of the communication part of TransUnion. Um so so uh I'm Mick Moss, I'm part of the the product team that helps enterprises connect with their consumers.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Well, that's uh makes it sound so simple, yet there's so much complexity happening in the telecom world. Describe some of the challenges uh that you help clients with these days.

Rebuilding Trust With Verified Identity

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yeah, that's right. I mean, right now the phone channel is is there's a lot of untrust that's there. Um a lot of the the uh surveys that we find is over 88% of calls are unanswered. Wow. Well I'm I'm in that 88% of it. Yeah, and and yeah, exactly. And and why would you in some of those cases? You're getting calls that come in that might show spam. They might just show the telephone number with no idea who it is, and you worry about fraud that's out there. So when you have all of those areas together, I mean, we're at this conference in Vegas, you don't have to go gamble. You it's almost like you're gambling every time a call comes in. Wow, great analogy. Yeah, so so what we're trying to do is how can we earn that trust back in the voice channel? When we look at how enterprises want to interact, they have all these different channels for communication. There's email, they have great websites, they have messaging that's there. But when it's important, it's a phone call that that's needed. Um, I recently had to do something with the insurance group. They um had an outdated license on there. They told me they weren't renewing my my uh my auto. And that came in as an email. And what was the very first thing that I did? I picked up the phone. You know, so that engaged conversation that you have is still very important in the enterprise space. So we want to win that back. How can we have an enterprise-to-consumer engagement where it's clear and it's trusted? And we're gonna do that through identity. Um, you and I talked a little bit before this about the FCC and what they're doing with Stir Shaking. We're we're gonna be able to lean into that and use those principles to say it's a clear identity, it's a trusted identity. Because we also want to make sure that you know we don't have fraud come in and try to use identity as a weapon in that sense. And so as we work with enterprises, we want to make sure that it's it's clear who they are. They've been vetted, their telephone numbers are understood, and as they're reaching out to consumers, it would clearly show the name as that call comes in. There's even options to be able to show the logo of the company. Oh wow, possibly a call reason that's on there. And all of this would be backed by you basically a a stir shake and underpinning that says this isn't something that fraud can get into.

How STIR SHAKEN Blocks Spoofing

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Well, it's an amazing mission and really important one. I can't believe it's 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell made that first phone call. That's right. And yet we still haven't solved this particular challenge. Uh-huh. Maybe talk about under the hood the technology that's enabling this and how you work with enterprise clients and what's involved in getting this going.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Yeah, so so a little bit on the work that we do is with the carrier community. We have carrier partners. You know, if we think about it from where we are in a US ecosystem, our partners allow us to be able to get reach to T-Mobile, to Verizon, to AT ⁇ T. That's over 285 million mobile devices where we can help influence the identity that's on there. And since we're utilizing the underpinning of Strashaken, it allows us to be able to make decisions when a call is good versus one that could be from a fraudster. So if you could imagine you get two separate phone call attempts. One's from the legitimate bank that you have, it shows the name that's on there, it's a call that you were expecting, you answer, great engagement. So then a fraudster tries to use that same telephone number. Very easy to spoof a telephone number in the industry these days. The way we can set this up, the orchestration between the enterprise, us, and the carrier community is we can prevent that call from even reaching your device. Oh, nice. So you're completely protected at that point. You know, it's it's no opportunity for a fraudster to even be able to have a conversation with you to put you at harm. But we're rewarding the enterprises when they do have the clear identity that's that's grounded in an authenticated call that allows us to be able to have that trust.

Healthcare And Other High Stakes Use Cases

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Fantastic. And it's not just nice to have, we're at uh the Enterprise Connect show, but HIMS, the big healthcare uh IT shows down the street. That's right. And um, it's a real problem when pharmacies can't call you or don't call you, or when providers have urgent calls and you're not sure who it is, elderly are often really confused on on this whole area. So you're really you could what are you doing, for example, in the healthcare space?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

So we're we're we're sort of vertical agnostic in a sense. Um we we look at each individual enterprise and the use case that they want to that they want to maintain and and run for their business. Healthcare is a big part of that. Um in fact, we we service veteran affairs in and helping them do clear community communication to their you know to all their members that are out there. And the goal is really outcomes. You know, sometimes it's it's as simple as I just want to have more people answer, I want to have engagement from there. And other cases, you know, maybe in the in the healthcare spaces, I want to reduce the number of calls back and forth and scheduling, you know, be able to make sure that you know claims and insurance are where they're supposed to be. Even in a use case that's not always, you know, everyone's best call, which might be a reminder for a debt. We work with those companies to say, you know, maybe the answer rate isn't the solution, but are they making their payments? Is that reminder effective with what they're doing? Um, financial services is hugely important to make sure that we prevent that fraud and that we're able to give that clear experience. Is there, you know, maybe refinancing a mortgage? You know, maybe, maybe they've got an overdrawn account that they're trying to get some servicing with. All of that is allowing us to sort of open up and get that clarity for for really, really anybody that makes calls and and wants that outcome of engagement.

What Comes Next For Call Fraud

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Fantastic. So big problem, and you're you're solving it. What's next? You must have a whole variety of other value-added services and features. Can you give us a peek into the future at uh transunion? What kind of things you're working on?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about um uh transunion as a whole, it it's it's more than a communication business. It's it's it's a data identity identity company that allows us to be able to help the enterprises engage with consumers. So, you know, what is the problems that an enterprise running into? Is it I'm just struggling to find the right time to call an individual or maybe the right number to call them. So we have opportunities to be able to help enterprises with that. Um, working on new solutions to where we can help make sure that both inbound and outbound calls are available. The idea that you might be able to, as an as an enterprise, let's say you have a bank, you've got fraud coming in. It's not just, you know, fraudsters trying to be imposters on your on your name, but also they're trying to get into your contact centers. So the idea is that we can show clear signals when it's a uh uh a legitimate user that's calling in versus someone that maybe you want to prompt and ask three or four questions versus a couple. That's information that helps sort of make sure that fraud doesn't end up in those sort of channels. And we're always we're always looking. I mean, fraud's gonna be the big topic for the next couple of years. Since we've got the identity services in place, we want to protect that as much as possible and then make sure that we can push fraud sort of out of this channel as much as we can.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Well, we're all rooting for you. So congratulations on helping so many customers onwards and upwards. Thanks so much. All right, thank you.