First Orion and Hiya join Neustar, Inc., a TransUnion company, and Transaction Network Services (TNS) to form a strategic partnership advancing the industry’s call vetting and authentication standards with a single framework across the largest carriers in North America.
The partnership helps to enable secure, trusted calls to more than 285 million mobile devices and the 90 million households that rely on landline phone service.
By validating legitimate enterprises and authenticating calls through an integrated network, First Orion, Hiya, Neustar and TNS help to protect subscribers from phone scams, support enterprise-to-consumer communication and restore trusted calls to the telecom ecosystem. The partnership reduces industry fragmentation with a common process for enterprises to brand calls on all major carriers. Components include:
- Vetting and Registration – Leveraging a proven approach, First Orion, Hiya, Neustar and TNS established best practices to validate the legitimacy of enterprises and confirm they have the right to use associated telephone numbers and enterprise calling party data so they can vet and register telephone numbers more rapidly.
- Authentication – Through a standards-based approach, the partnership provides new, seamless functionality to enterprises and contact centers so they can participate in the call authentication process. Using Out-of-Band SHAKEN, for instance, automates the end-to-end process of digitally validating calls.
Enterprises use branded calling to add their brand name, logo, call reason and more to the mobile display for outbound calls. This capability delivers a transparent customer experience and can help improve contact rates and customer engagement, which can increase revenues. Through this partnership, each company monitors the delivery of branded calling services across the various networks to help prevent scams and better protect consumers against bad actors who may attempt to misuse the service.
“The partnership’s extensive experience working with some of the largest enterprises in the U.S. allowed us to recognize the benefit of a standardized approach to vetting,” said Joe Stinziano, president and COO at First Orion. “Collectively, we support restoring trust in voice calling and helping organizations dramatically improve call engagement rates – while guarding against misuse by unauthorized parties.”
Hiya’s President Kush Parikh added, “Many service providers don’t have the ability to confidently vet their customers or confirm the caller’s true identity at scale. Branded calls allow subscribers to make informed decisions about which calls to answer – and as result grow trust in the voice network. This partnership will add great value to communication service providers, enterprises, and consumers as the phone remains the preferred communications channel.”
For more information, visit the respective websites of First Orion, Hiya, Neustar and TNS.
