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The second part of the interview with ���Ƕ���Ƶ’s Director of Product Management Bob Grant discusses how cross border call authentication gives service providers an added value proposition for their enterprise customers. It also covers how the industry should proceed together to ensure that legitimate businesses can continue to rely on the cost efficiencies of voice calls, which carry the destination country’s CallerID, to engage with consumers. In case you missed it: check out Part One of the interview.

How does cross border authentication establish trust and effectively deliver voice traffic?

Cross border call authentication can ensure that originating calls from outside of the U.S. and Canada establish the same secure digital handshake to authenticate the accuracy of the calling number information between the service providers originating the call and those terminating the call. This helps ensure that legitimate calls originating outside of the U.S. and Canada receive the correct attestation, according to the current STIR/SHAKEN framework.

That said, cross border call authentication also requires coordination between two countries. Countries must share trusted information and lists with each other to ensure the correct attestation is assigned to the call – which means that it is critical that there is a high level of cooperation and comfortability in sharing that information and that each country adheres to similar levels of standards that ensure trust, reliability and accuracy.

What industries are impacted the most by this?

One sector that is being impacted by this is offshore contact centers. Often contact centers for legitimate U.S. businesses are located outside the U.S., and therefore their calls originate from other countries, even when they are authorized to use a U.S. phone number. So, when the call enters the country, the service providers – based on analytics – are flagging the call as suspicious because it appears to be an illegally spoofed number versus an authorized one. This would likely result in calls getting the C attestation and being labeled as spam, which likely results in them being unanswered.

Other times, a call may originate in one country and be transmitted across several intermediary networks before arriving in the U.S. When that occurs, it is more difficult to verify the originating service provider and to confirm that the CallerID information is accurate. In this scenario, if a call is flagged as suspicious, traceback can be used to identify the source of those calls and block those calls.

Because of this, it's key to have a mechanism in place that allows for cross border call authentication, such as origin-based call identification and authentication, to show that the number is legitimate, deserving of a higher-level attestation and to ensure that these calls can get across the border with their CallerID intact.

What is the best solution for addressing cross border call authentication and who needs to be involved in making this a reality?

Different countries and entities are doing their own thing to protect their domestic consumers and businesses. It is time to broaden that viewpoint to collectively say, “we need to deal with illegal calling on a more global basis.”

This means bringing service provider communities and regulators together to align on a framework that separates the legitimate callers and their CallerIDs from the illegal ones. This can accelerate cooperation on a global standard built on best practices, implemented by countries with call authentication tools in place.

Since it would likely take years to see a meaningful amount of jurisdiction-driven call authentication by rulemaking, cross border call authentication provides an ideally smooth path to that and can start much sooner. There is no better time to get started.

To learn more, tune into the on-demand webinar .