Peter Ford is Executive Vice President, Information Solutions Business for iconectiv.
There’s strength in numbers. That’s something to keep in mind when considering how to safeguard the messaging channels that consumers overwhelmingly prefer to interact with retailers, banks, airlines, pharmacies, schools and other organizations.
For example, consider Short Message Service (SMS)—also known as text messaging—which has become a critical channel for businesses to communicate with their customers. In fact, according to recent surveys, customers prefer text messages over phone calls for many services, and the average read rate for an SMS campaign is 97% versus just a 20% open rate for email.
Likewise, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) supports images, audio and video, making it ideal for business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions where text alone isn’t as powerful.
Lastly, the latest messaging advancement, Rich Communication Services (RCS), gives businesses even more options to engage with customers. One example is artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots that help travelers book flights and hotels or provide concierge-style shopping.
RCS, SMS and MMS all have one thing in common: Their reach and effectiveness depend on trust.
If consumers don’t trust that those messages are coming from legitimate businesses, they ignore them, undermining the value of all three channels for B2C interaction and engagement.
The Trust Factor
Understanding how technologies can lose consumer trust and then regain it is key to avoiding that problem in the first place. Case in point: voice calls. According to the FCC, Americans receive about 4 billion robocalls a month—conditioning them to let calls from unfamiliar or unidentified numbers drop into voicemail 76% of the time.
As a result, legitimate organizations struggle to reach consumers with important information that they want to receive, such as appointment reminders and flight updates.
Carriers, their suppliers, industry organizations and regulators have spent the past several years creating and implementing an industry-standard framework—STIR/SHAKEN—that enables carriers to cryptographically sign and verify caller ID information. This authentication ensures the caller ID that consumers see is not illegally spoofed. Since 2021, the overall volume of scam calls has been decreasing every year and service providers have blocked billions of robocalls since STIR/SHAKEN has been implemented.
By weeding out nefarious activity, consumer trust in caller IDs will be steadily restored, making recipients more inclined to answer calls, which benefits consumers and businesses alike.
Standard, industry-wide approaches like STIR/SHAKEN highlight the strength of a phone number. Because dozens of carriers and vendors pooled their expertise to tackle a common problem, the framework’s effectiveness doesn’t depend on a single business, unlike anti-fraud mechanisms in other industries.
For example, many social media companies now offer a checkmark to show consumers that an account has been verified. But fraudsters have spoofed those accounts. This means that consumers are faced with verifying they’re engaged with the right business, and businesses are faced with managing bespoke verification systems and processes across multiple platforms. It’s a band-aid on a long-term problem.
Lessons Learned And Applied
Messaging’s popularity and ubiquity have made it attractive to fraudsters and spammers.
For example, one common text message scam claims that the recipient has a package that can’t be delivered unless they click a link to provide information. Once clicked, the fraudster uses that information for identity theft. According to research cited by Reader’s Digest, the number of spam texts has surpassed the number of spam calls, and text-based fraud is estimated to have cost consumers $10 billion in 2023.
As a newer technology, RCS has the unique opportunity to apply lessons learned from previous communication fraud schemes to prevent or help mitigate emerging types of fraud and spam.
This process starts with leveraging how carriers, industry associations and other stakeholders are minimizing text messaging fraud and spam to restore consumer trust. For example, many of the technologies used to identify and block fraudulent and spam texts also support the GSMA’s Verified Sender initiative, which authenticates businesses when they send RCS messages to consumers.
Since RCS uses technology that supports a tunneled or encrypted connection to carriers—and because RCS was designed with verified senders’ cryptographic credentials presented before their name and logo are displayed to users—it is much more difficult to impersonate an RCS sender. Furthermore, the vetting and verification process is much stricter than other messaging options. These are key differences from SMS and MMS because these safeguards were built into RCS before it rolled out.
Carriers and the industry have a vested interest in ensuring that consumer trust in RCS remains high. According to a MarketsandMarkets study, the global RCS market size is projected to grow from $5.2 billion in 2020 to $11.7 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.6%. Considering that RCS enables a wider variety of B2C use cases, it’s reasonable to assume that it will provide carriers with even more revenue than SMS.
Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” This sentiment resonates deeply in the mobile industry as it reflects a collective learning journey. Just as military historians analyze past conflicts for insights, the technology community must come together—carriers, businesses and regulators alike—to draw from both our successes and failures in combating voice and SMS fraud.
By fostering collaboration and sharing best practices, we can ensure a robust framework that safeguards the next generation of messaging no matter how it evolves. The lessons learned from the past are not just reflections; they are a call to action for all constituents to unite and fortify the landscape against emerging threats.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
