 Hi, everyone, and welcome back to JSA TV and JSA podcasts where we are talking to leaders from across our industry on the latest trends, news, and innovation. And joining me right now is John Brunner, CEO of Aegis Mobile. Thank you for joining us. This is our first time chatting on JSA TV. This is. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. We are excited to chat with you and want to start, I think, if we could, by telling our viewers, because it's our first time with this, with our JSA TV audience talking to you directly, would love to hear a little bit of the story of Aegis Mobile. I know it was founded in 2006. You came to take the helm in 2012. Can you talk a little bit about what's happened since? Sure. Thank you very much, and thank you again for having me. So Aegis was founded in 2006, working in an industry called Premium SMS, which was the ability to buy ringtones and wallpaper with your cell phone and bill it to your cell phone bill. During those early years, fraud emerged in many different ways. False advertising, false opt-in processes where you would actually make the purchases. And so Aegis came along to create innovative ways to identify and shut down those bad actors and developed a number of products in that space over the period of years. And it was a great industry that ultimately grew to about $3 billion in the U.S. market total revenue. It's a lot of wallpaper ringtones to be buying, and to think about it. So I understand that one of the areas that you have a special focus on is the business to consumer market, specifically messaging and creating a trusted source for that messaging. Can you talk about that? Sure. It's very interesting because Premium SMS was actually stopped in 2014 in the U.S. market and eventually fell in most markets other than the Africa and South America. And anyway, so what wound up emerging are things like direct care billing, location services, identity platforms, which are value-added services that carriers offered, and Aegis jumped into those spaces and began providing compliance services. But one of the things that emerged was knowing who the software companies are that are actually engaging the carriers' customers. And so Aegis early on developed vetting and verification services to look at the history and legitimacy of companies and their backgrounds to determine would they potentially harm consumers before allowing them to enter the network. Now about two years ago, the United States was looking to launch something called 10DLC, which is text-enabling your 10-digit log code. So companies that have a phone number that everybody knows can now register and get this phone number text-enabled because consumers love texting far more than they love voice conversations or even emails. And so this has emerged to a historic level in that nowhere else in the world have we actually completed the largest registry process that exists. So what is this? This is about a known sender so that consumers can know that they're safe engaging a text message from a business. And what Aegis did two years ago was took our vetting capabilities, which we've been doing for a dozen plus years, and transform those into an automated API-based verification and vetting platform. So today we receive anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 companies every day that are coming through a group called the Campaign Registry to register and get their phone number enabled. And Aegis in three seconds is verifying the identity of the company. And in 10 to 15 seconds can do a complete behavioral background check on that company to determine is there anything in their history that would indicate that they're going to harm a consumer. And so this has created, we've now passed over 2 million transactions within the platform over the last 14 months. And to our knowledge, there is no larger implementation in the world. And the ultimate objective is that if we can get to a place where it's low friction, low cost, high volume capability, there's no reason that any company in America or actually there's 180 countries participating in this platform. But every company can register and become a known sender no matter their size or the industry that they're in because it's low friction, low cost and fast. Oh, wow. Yeah, huge volumes you're talking about and such a secure source for that. And so that makes me think you and I understand that you, I mean, obviously you're experts in the management of this data, the protection of it. But also that leads to the ability for you to gather large amounts of intelligence, right? And so how do you use that? What value does that bring to your ecosystem? So it's actually interesting. One of the things that we learned from a data perspective is that obviously this is data about companies, but it's not necessarily PII data. It's not necessarily data that has problems with GDPR. These are businesses that are registering. So they're essentially doing a contract to be on a channel to do messaging. And supply chains are always doing verifications, just not at this scale and this speed and this accuracy, if you will. A couple of different things though, we have to employ a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning to ensure that all the data we're gathering on a company is in fact on that company, right? And we have processes that identify data quality coming back and does it truly belong to the company that we're looking at? And if not, then you have people that can intercept and look at it and verify or change the data to be sure that we're accurate. But on the flip side as well, retaining this data as long as you're on the network, when we find bad actors and they get shut down by their carriers that they're operating on, they often can create another company and come back very quickly. Or they've created hundreds of companies to stable low thresholds and do a lot of behavior against consumers that's not good. But they stable the thresholds because it's spread across many, many different companies. So with our verification vetting capabilities, we can actually relate companies to each other. And so not only can we identify that there's 300 companies associated to this bad actor and we then discover they're all doing bad things, we can also, when they come back as a new entity, we're able to match on dozens of data fields and something is going to match that's going to trigger it to be looked at to say, have we seen this company? Have they been shut down? And then we can notify the carriers so that they can make decisions. So it's not only about knowing who's sending, but it's also about people will come in. They will do bad things. But once we identify them and we know who they are, it's very hard for them to come back or spread across other companies within the existing portfolio. Well, that's powerful and fantastic. And one of the things that you mentioned was around AI and machine learning. I think that that's interesting as we think about where we're sitting right now at Capacity in Europe, halfway through the show, I think, I don't know about you, but a lot of the things that we hear about, that I've been hearing about anyway, this week, different from years past, years past, we've been hearing about how AI has been driving demand and the supply to support it. But people now are talking about, like you are, about how to really use those tools for the benefit of businesses and ultimately our customers and the end user that it may impact. So that's really interesting to hear how you're able to. The big beauty about AI, too, is that it's in machine learning because it's both about learning, algorithms and technology that's learning. And the reality is, is that having been in fraud protection services for telecommunications for 16 years, 17 years now, we have seen continuous evolution. I mean, when we started, it was flip phones. Today, it's, you know, small handheld computers, but the methodologies by which bad actors go after consumers continues to evolve because they're very smart. They're very well funded. And so these types of technologies actually are agile and they learn. And so it's perfect. It's perfect fit. Yeah. Fantastic. It's been great chatting with you. Well, thank you. I hope you have a great rest of the show, the rest of the week that you're here. And so for folks that want to connect with you and your company, how can they do so? Well, I guess they can contact me via the email. I don't know if we can post it or. Yeah, we'll put up on screen your website for sure. People can go go there and learn more about you. Okay. Well, thank you very much. And thank you to JSA for hosting me. This is a wonderful experience. We look forward to many, many more conversations. Shows like this and otherwise. And so thank you again. Thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in here again to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking.