Messaging is one of the most trusted forms of communications today, with more than 2.2 trillion texts exchanged on America’s wireless networks in 2022 alone. Yesterday, at CTIA’s ConnectMobile forum in Las Vegas as part of Mobile World Congress (MWC), expert stakeholders from across the messaging ecosystem discussed how to best facilitate messaging and continue to protect consumers from unwanted messages, which are on the rise. We want to highlight two of these panel discussions: one on “The Brand and the Sender Identity,” which featured a group of experts from @NetNumber, @FirstOrionCorp, and @Somos_Inc discussing strategies for preserving trust and protecting companies and consumers from fraud, and another discussing compliance strategies for companies sending outbound messaging communications, which featured our colleague Kevin Rupy.
During the first panel, industry experts discussed the importance of enterprise callers building and maintaining good reputations behind the phone numbers they use for outbound calls. The panelists also discussed the need to facilitate data sharing between call analytics providers to fight fraudsters that, according to First Orion Co-Founder and Head of Strategy Jeff Stalnaker, made approximately $47 billion in scams in 2022 (which would rank them 92nd on the Fortune 100). The panelists also underscored the issue of cleaning up STIR/SHAKEN data, which is critical to building trustworthy next-generation branded calling technologies; and developing innovative vetting and know-your-customer procedures for evaluating messaging traffic.
As part of the second panel, “A Lawyer’s Guide to the Messaging Galaxy,” Kevin encouraged companies to consult their legal counsel before starting a messaging campaign to ensure they comply with a host of federal and state regulatory obligations, as well as industry best practices and standards. On fighting back against diverse and evolving robocalling and robotexting scams, he noted that when you develop a playbook to fight the bad actors, it must be unique to the opponent, citing the industry’s development of STIR/SHAKEN and call blocking technologies to combat illegal robocall spoofing. In the texting space, Kevin noted that industry has developed the Secure Messaging Initiative, which is an industry-led initiative to share information on suspected illegal or unwanted text messaging campaigns with federal and state enforcers to protect consumers from fraud.
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