 Hey everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome to this exclusive LinkedIn live event from NetNumber Global Data Services. The NetNumber team is very excited to dig deep into its new solution, the NetNumber Confidence Index, and unveil the advantages it offers. Throughout this live event, guys, we'll be shedding light on core communications tenants, common routing gaps and their impacts, the role, the dynamic data that supports that routing plays in evolving requirements, and ultimately, how to optimize trust, liability, and efficiency across operational processes and customer experiences. In short, we're talking about the value of making trust a truly measurable metric in this industry, which cannot be understated. So, let's get to it. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Cutaya, founder and CEO of JSA. And let's first do some introductions. Today, I am so honored to be joined by three NetNumber and industry experts. We have Mr. Kathleen Badea, Vice President of Product Management, Mr. Bradley Greer, Senior Director of Data Solutions and Partnerships, and Dr. Marco LeFrance, Vice President of Business and Market Development joining us today. Now, of course, as we head into our discussion, I want to remind our fabulous attendees here that if you have questions you want to hear from you, please go ahead and enter them into the chat and we'll address them at the end. All right, Kathleen, as our product data guru, why don't you set the scene for us as we begin to dive deeper into everything that is the NetNumber Confidence Index. Thank you so much, Jamie, and hello, everyone. So, as you mentioned, the mobile communications ecosystem is really dynamic and there are all kinds of messages, all kinds of voice calls and other types of transactions, either originating, transiting or terminating a tool or at a growing number of points globally. And what the data from those numbers tells the organizations is really key to keeping routing efficiency secure and reliable. Now, getting a clear real-time view into this changing ecosystem is really important to limit fraud and also to avoid lost revenue from misdirected calls or from failed routing. It's also important in order to preserve time, energy and resources. Now, until recently, there was really no such good tool that could effectively deliver this insight. But with the help of our newly unveiled NetNumber Confidence Index that we're here to talk today about, we're reimagining how service providers, network operators and brands can manage their routing by making trust measurable. Oh, wonderful. Amazing. With that in mind, let's go ahead and start with some questions for the team. Marco, I'm going to start with you first. Trust, routing and provisioning are three core tenants of a successful mobile communication strategy. What role do these aspects of modern communications play? And how are they expressed in today's business environment? Yeah. Yeah. Let's go through them one by one, like provisioning. I would say the first step of the successful mobile communication strategy is the enablement of your desired channels. And this always starts with selecting your phone numbers and provisioning them for the services needed. Here it is important to recognize that the selected phone numbers will always be part of your network and your digital identity. That is very important to keep in mind. Next, I would say the second step is to ensure an excellent quality of service, which means routing done right. Making quick and accurate decisions require reliable phone number intelligence provided in real time. Because as always, decisions can only be as good as the context and information you have available. And then the third step is building and protecting a good reputation. Trust. The experiences your mobile communications provide are directly determining the success of your strategy, right? This means that the phone numbers and services you have chosen are provisioned, which also means your digital identity and your network should not be associated with nuances, scams or spam. Yeah. And you know, trust in particular often proves so difficult really of an idea to pin down. Brad, why is having trust so important in today's global communications and what is there to say about the current state of fraud? Oh, my gosh, let's start with the current state of fraud. The world is always on fire, guys. When you think about communication, it has brought us all together in many different ways, right? When you think about the risk of that communication not working or being compromised, you get terrified. You think about things like, oh, my gosh, I just sent a text message and I really sent it to the right person. Or, oh, my gosh, I just received this phone call. Was this really my bank or financial institution? So there are so many different messages and phone calls touching our lives day to day. The world's busy. The economy is drained everywhere. We're busier than ever working to keep afloat. And the last thing you can do is question the reliability of your communication provider. That's why this is so important. It's so important to understand what data is flowing behind the scenes that makes all that come together and makes that trust happen. If your communication provider or even the other end of the person on the other end of the phone, if you question trust, you have nothing. 5% of the world, every year, 5% of the world is adopting smartphones. Those people are on attack. They don't know everything going on in smartphones if they haven't had one for 10 years. They don't know the sophistication that fraudsters or the community behind the scenes is really doing to provoke them. So I will say that trust is probably first and foremost the most important thing going on, Jamie, that all of us in this industry need to focus on. I couldn't agree more. When we think about common gaps too in MNO, CPAS, enterprise mobile communication strategies, well, Kathleen, maybe you can answer this for me. What do they look like? What are common causes of lost revenue, lost customer experience opportunities, or even security vulnerabilities? Yeah, so there are two aspects to talk about here really. The first one is process and cost optimization, and the other one is fraud prevention. The main challenge here is that the data in the industry is highly fragmented. There is plenty of data. There are many data sets, but just the sheer complexity of dealing with different data formats, different pricing models, different contractual arrangements. This makes many users simply use the data in a suboptimal way, and then what we see is that fraudsters are really skilled. They obviously have strong financial motivations, and this makes it such that just the number of fraud types that are out there is extremely high. You can see on the screen this is just a little summary, a few boxes that illustrate the most common or the most damaging fraud types out there that affect the mobile ecosystem, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. If we look at some of the industry-led fraud prevention initiatives or fraud classification initiatives, let's say the MEF messaging fraud framework for messaging or the voice fraud framework developed in the i3 forum. We see there that we're speaking about 50, 20, 30, or even more fraud types, and the variations of these ones appear all the time. We have this just the sheer size of the fraud, and it's variety, and then on the other side, many businesses are just using the data and the tools that are out there suboptimally due to all this fragmentation. Scary and expensive, two words that come to mind when I see that graphic. Marco, what about today's mobile ecosystem? What about it makes it so hard to account for these gaps, these mobile numbers are changing? How are use cases changing as a result? Yeah, that's a good point, and I think if you take a look at what Kathleen has just shown and what he has just said, complexity has consequences, right? And I would say today the mobile ecosystem is rather slow, and that also means it's rather slow to react. And on top of this, complexity typically also comes with a lack of transparency, so the ownership and reputation of phone numbers lack transparency in the ecosystem today. And this is a problem, right? Because the phone numbers and the tech vectors change faster than the ecosystem today shares respective insights. So unfortunately, this is also because many of the processes to fight bad actors involve the exchange of lists, lists of phone numbers. Often these processes are still manual, but even if they're automated, which is always the case, it takes way too long until networks and systems have adopted these updates. So today it is really necessary for successful mobile communications to involve real-time phone number intelligence. And there was something else in your question that triggered me a bit. I want to highlight that mobile communications, right, it does involve all types of numbers, not just mobile numbers. So in general, businesses use landline, VoIP and torturing numbers for their communications. Programmable communications also uses all of those. And consumers too do use virtual numbers in applications like Pinga and Google Voice. And I say that because, like, of course, all of these numbers and associated data sets are part of the net number data bundle. And the net number confidence index verifies all number types and uses the appropriate signals. Amazing. And that's a great lead-in to talking about both numeric check and NCI. All right, guys, NNCI net number confidence index. What problems did net number identify that led to the creation of both NNCI and numeric check, these tools? And what are the benefits they bring to the table? Kathleen, I'm going to start with you. Sure. Well, I started by saying that I'm still surprised to see how many companies out there still aim to use HLR queries as a tool to verify phone numbers in 2023. That might have been an option 20 years ago, but in the meantime, the entire industry has evolved and we have much better, much stronger tools to perform number verification and phone prevention. The truth is that there is plenty of high quality data out there. We have, for example, more and more mobile network operators exposing their data via real powerful APIs. By now, most of the operators have deployed either SMS or voice firewalls. They see the traffic into and out of the networks in real time and they use AI to detect fraud as it happens. Net number has been in this space for over 20 years now. We also have a lot of our own data as well. We've been collecting this data, distributing it to the entire ecosystem for a long period of time. And our customers use us for routing and billing, authentication, fraud prevention. Now, there is a lot of data, but the challenge is really taking it, taking all these signals and voiding it out to something really simple and useful. And that's what we did with NumeriCheck. This is our service to verify phone numbers. It's really powerful. It's real time and it's very flexible. It supports a lot of use cases. It can be configured specifically to adapt to different use cases and different customer requests from SMS and voice origination to termination in the wholesale world. We also incorporated dynamic do not originate capability to the product and then obviously fraud prevention for carriers and other enterprises out there. Now, the net number confidence index is the corollary of this because it's a simple numeric index 0 to 5 that helps assess any phone number anywhere in the world and its transaction real time. Wow. Okay. So I should just take a second here and tell our viewers at home, go ahead and scan the QR code over my shoulder. Always point the wrong way. There is. If you want more information on NNCI and NumeriCheck, because this is really incredible tools here. And getting back to that 0 to 5 ranking. Brad, this question is for you. When we think about trust as a metric, how would you say we make this jump from being a nebulous idea to really being a 0 to 5 ranking? How is something so complex translated into a simple number? Yeah. So, so yeah, I mean, phone numbers themselves, Jamie are complex. As Catalan was explaining, we went to great lengths and measurements to develop the confidence index and the numeric tech logic. So really, everybody's curious to know what's powered. Think of this as a grid or a way for you to understand or normalize every single phone number in your mobile ecosystem. What we've done is we've designed a very simple output logic, right? But complex behind the scenes that takes information and timestamps. And you have two different components or two different sides to the business, right? You have the trust and the risk. What we've done is we've put this all into an equation in our 20 years of experience and handling phone connectivity data globally. And what we're really doing is we're ranking and you're able to see normalcy across your total ecosystem of phone numbers. So really the numeric tech logic and the confidence index is really just taking everything that we know here at net number about a phone number and creating a grid for you. You'll notice, you know, that your phone numbers will start swaying or changing a certain way over time. So really at the high level, the three things that go into this are really good old fashioned practices of standardization, number portability, those sorts of things. We have all sorts of phone behavioral patterns. And then we have global real time communications networks and we really focus on those three different data categories to bring that in to the confidence ranking over to the right of this diagram. And speaking about this diagram, let's go ahead and leave it up and bring Brad in here. Data is at the core of any trust ranking. So how does net number ensure that we're using the right data for the right result? Yeah, so communications happen fast, right? There are text messages and phone numbers happening at all times at any given time. That leaves static across your ecosystem. So what we're really focused on doing is we're focused on capturing those time stamps and that accurate data in real time. And we're delivering that to you in real time because a phone number can become disconnected or invalid at any given time based upon an event that happens. So really what we're doing is we're capturing a lot of that data behind the scenes and basically making our whole entire product line available to you through this confidence index. So really talking through what that means is phone numbers are static to begin with, right? If you're making a call, you're going to call a number in one week and then next week it could become disconnected, right? Well, what over time this grid will help you do is it will help you kind of predict the way that that phone number is moving through your ecosystem. So if a phone number starts off at a four and then you see it downgraded to a two, there could be a connectivity issue there that maybe eventually results in it being a one. So basically what we're doing is we're taking all of these different time stamps of connectivity across the world and we're normalizing it, we're simplifying it. How do we make sure that it's accurate? We're continually evaluating false positives, right, that are happening across the world. And the reason why false positives happen across the world is because each communication provider is doing things a little differently or they're trying to meet the demands of their subscriber, whether it's a business or a consumer. So what we're really doing is we're evaluating continually to perfect and improve this service based on those end operators, right? And there are thousands of end operators across the world. So we have a big job ahead of us, but the great thing is, is the grid is still there. You can tell a lot about a phone number predictively if the confidence index changes. It could be that the way that you're engaging with that subscriber or that phone number has changed substantially due to the behaviors behind the phone number. So there's just a lot of different ways without giving away the secret sauce just understanding that anytime there's a timestamp of connectivity or anytime there's some sort of change in the phone number. We're behind the scenes calculating it. Wow, well said. Thank you, Brad. Having over the entire life cycle of a customer journey, there are a host of moments when trust becomes paramount for safety, reliability, you name it. Can you walk us through some of those use cases perhaps? Sure. Yeah, well, the NNCI could be used for tens or even hundreds of use cases really across a lot of industries and ecosystems. But I think the easiest way to visualize it today is to just take a few use cases, one from each of the representatives, the representative industries here, I would say. So let's start with enterprises. Enterprises can use the NNCI during their user onboarding process to make sure that those signing up on their platform are legitimate. So this approach keeps those with bad intentions away, scammers, spammers, even bots and the enterprise can secure also their high value transactions. For example, a password reset or a change of delivery address by verifying the phone number of that user. Whenever unusual signals are related to the phone number are detected, then this might indicate, for example, an account takeover attempt. If we're looking at carriers as another industry here, they can strengthen their spam detection by implementing checks on phone numbers being used as either senders or receivers of voice or messaging. And in particular, when this information is used or combined with firewalls or honeypots that analyze the content of the communications, it's really powerful because the problem is then fought from both angles. We also see increased regulator demand for do not originate implementations. And here, I mentioned earlier, the NNCI is essentially a dynamic do not originate indicator for numbers globally. And that's why it's really powerful when we compare it, for example, with static lists of numbers that are on a DNO list. Lastly here, in terms of CPAS players wholesale providers in messaging or voice, this can use the NNCI for anything from routing and cost optimization to fraud prevention. By checking either again the sender or the destination of a message or a voice call. This gives them the opportunity to increase the margin for their business. And we know that in this business, the margins are really low. So every every send save there is important. And also to avoid financial losses from potential fraud on their on their platform. Wow, that graphic was really so helpful breaking down NNCI per vertical. I appreciate that so much. Marco, when we're talking about the mobile ecosystem, who does NNCI cater to in the mobile ecosystem? And how is it part of an overall optimized vetted and validation process? Yeah, that's a good point. But I have to admit that after listening to Catherine, it's probably shorter to answer who does not benefit from the net numbers confidence index. Because I think the index that we have shown so far really like benefits every company that participates in mobile communication, may it be content creation, origination, transit, termination, mobile operators, brands, businesses, call centers, like you name it. I think there is a different perspective to who it caters to, right? And that's the question of, like, who is the actual user of it? And how can you productively benefit from it? So let's take a look at the users, like meaning the implementation. So from a user perspective, the net number confidence index, I would say also caters not only to every enterprise, but also to all sophistication levels. Like when I hear Brad talk, and he comes from the industry with a very long background, like he's an expert, right? Like he is like so sophisticated in data analysis and interpretation. It's great, but potentially not every company is at Brad's level or has a Brad. Like we have a Brad, like we lend it out to you, no problem. Like if you need some advice, like you can always like ask us whether you can get Brad. But back to the question. So I would say like every sophistication level is catered to. So basic implementations where you may limit your focus on the zeros for a very easy yes or no decision. I think every customer can implement this with very tiny and little investment. Then more advanced setups, more advanced implementations can consider the full range of scores and support a way more flexible decision making as Brad has pointed out, which then can also trigger in your cases like further scrutiny and other follow up processes. And then finally, like if you're a bigger company or you're a specialized on working with data and you have a bit more budget, if your own data infrastructure, potentially your own analysts, you can even take our confidence index and use that as a signal to put this into context and correlate this with your existing data lakes and your existing signals and your own data. And can then take our data also and our signals and interpretation that we give to you, the phone verification for other highly specialized use cases in the industries that Katherine has just mentioned. Incredible, incredible. And I am seeing our chat light up with so many questions for all of our three experts here. And before I get to them and go ahead guys, write those questions in. We want to hear from you. But before I get to them, I do want to go around the home, if you will, with my one final question. And I'm going to start with Kathleen here and then Marco and Brad. So with this kind of tool in hand, which is incredible, powerful tool, what do you think the future of mobile communications is going to look like? Big question. Kathleen. Yeah, I was muted here, apologies. Yeah, a word with less fraud. I'm careful to say not a word with no fraud. That's impossible. Fraudsters are highly motivated. They always find ways like I said earlier, but it's definitely possible with NNCI to reduce the amount of fraud, to significantly reduce the amount of fraud in all these industries and use cases that we described. So yeah, we do believe it's a powerful tool. Try it and then we were confident that you will be convinced by it. All right, Marco, you're up next. Yeah. The first thing that came to my mind when we designed this product was like, like the picture of like channels and channels being like today very noisy, which causes a lot of nuance. Like also the fact that consumers don't really like communications by businesses anymore, like proactive communications. I think it's because there is so much noise on the channels that you don't want. So with such a product at hand, I think we can all clean up our like pipes or like networks. And we hope that that brings out some confidence to you and your customers into communications overall. Like the confidence that we have in phone numbers, like we want to share this with the ecosystem and the industry. So everybody can have confidence in communications as well to create like trust in telecommunications for consumers and businesses. Yeah. Right. Incredible. All right. And in closing, Brad. It's a tough question. I'm going to get a little philosophical. To Catelyn, Marco agree with everything you say we've worked really hard to develop this confidence index, right? So I want to talk to the enterprises. Enterprises. Think about this. Think about a world to where you have a new status quo to where every time you send a message. Every time you make a voice call, you now have a way to know that that phone numbers valid and connected and reachable. Right. Well, that upticks the status quo for the right message and the right communications. So setting aside all the fraud, setting aside all of the other things that this this confidence index is capable of that kind of puts the pressure back on you. Is it puts the pressure back on you to make sure that the right message is received at the right time or the right call or the efficiency or the bottom line in your contact center is being met. It holds us all accountable to taking our businesses to the next level as it pertains to communications. So I will say that I know that that's a big ambiguous statement, Jamie. And I'm sorry I get kind of philosophical about it, but I will say if this is ingested and improved and scaled over time, we're going to live in a world to where we already know whether or not somebody could pick up the phone or whether somebody is reading our text message. I'll close with that. I love that closing so big so strong. And I do want to get to some of the, the chatter that's going on and thank you for our questions guys from our active audience participating that over 310 attendees registered as we're going into this so I love to see, you know, that this NCI solution this tool is really driving the type of audience it deserves. And okay so easy one, I think, to address quickly is we have some folks saying how do I how do I learn more, where can I go. So correct me if I'm wrong guys but just scan that QR code right over our shoulders here. And I will take you right to the landing page that will get you more information on net numbers tools and NCI net number customer. Any other questions that we want to address from. Okay, here we go. Kathleen this one's for you I think how flexible is numeric check in terms of adapting to messaging versus voice requirements good question. Yeah, good question definitely. The important part here is that numeric check is built in a really flexible way in terms of the underlying signals and the underlying data sets. And this is what a net number can adapt adjust to meet a specific customer requirement. There are signals out there that are messaging specific there are signals that are voice specific. There are data sets that are related to originating phone numbers like do not originate data sets. There are signals out there that relate to termination like not called registries. So this complexity. So there is a certain degree of complexity but it's kind of baked into the service and we can configure the service to adapt to a specific use case and a specific customer requirement. That's why it's really important in the, you know, in the beginning of the conversation to, you know, make sure that we fully understand how the service is going to use to be used. We're providing, you know, our expertise and our consultancy there and we're happy through, you know, trial and production to find you in the service to make sure that is delivering the exact results that our customers expect. Yeah. And, and also for the audience, think about it this way. I mean, we see phone number data all the time at every given second right now there there there's data flowing through net numbers veins, right. I will say this that there are phone numbers that are only enabled to receive text messages. There are phone numbers that are only enabled to see voice. All of that goes into numera check. We have that information we know what's going on behind the scenes. So just to kind of add to what cattle and saying, you know, I think that it's important that, you know, you start knowing that too. And, you know, what, what a great ending words I feel like in cognizant of time. Want to close there but don't worry guys if you had written some questions in our chat we're going to get back to you we will respond. And, oh, thank you so much gentlemen there is a wealth of information right here for organizations with a variety of mission critical goals. I just want to make sure that the data data is at the heart of tomorrow's success and intelligent real time solutions like an NCI net number confidence index, leading the charge. Thank you. And everyone plays safe and happy networking.