Insights

Call Authentication Is the New Trust Signal: Why Financial Institutions Need to Lead

Sep 11, 2025

It was a legitimate call.

Your fraud team was responding in real time to a flagged transaction, a potential compromise. The phone number used was registered, authenticated and assigned correctly, but the customer didn’t answer.

Later, when they were asked why, their response was simple: “It said Spam Likely.”

This isn’t rare. Even technically valid, authenticated calls can be ignored when the caller ID doesn’t reflect trust. And for financial institutions, that’s a growing risk, because every unanswered call isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s a missed moment to prove your brand’s integrity.

Voice remains one of the most effective tools in high-stakes communication. It enables institutions to resolve issues, stop fraud in its tracks, and restore confidence. But that only works when customers feel secure picking up the phone. And increasingly, they don’t.

A Surge in Spoofing and Erosion of Trust

Yes, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) data for 2024 shows a much higher total for internet crime losses, $16.6 billion, a notable 33% increase over 2023. These attacks are designed to deceive, using falsified caller IDs to mimic institutions that people inherently trust.

Fraudsters are no longer relying on obscure numbers. They’re targeting Toll-Free lines, inbound-only numbers and even those reserved for fraud response. Their goal is simple: appear as legitimate as possible, bypass defenses and exploit moments of urgency.

Even with protocols like STIR/SHAKEN in place to validate caller identity, spoofing persists. Authentication, while critical, doesn’t always tell the whole story, leaving space for criminals to manipulate trust and urgency to their advantage.

Why Authentication Alone Isn’t Enough

Authentication confirms that the number wasn’t altered during transmission. It says, “This call is coming from where it says it’s coming from.” But what if the number itself shouldn’t be making calls? Or what if the caller ID is technically correct, but the number was never intended for outbound use?

Without a layer of visibility, without knowing who has the Right-to-Use (RTU) that number, authentication can only go so far. You need both validation of the path and verification of the sender.

That’s where RealBrand™ steps in.

RealBrand Pairs Authentication with Real-Time Number Intelligence

With RealBrand, institutions gain the tools to monitor call authentication status and connect every outbound call to its rightful owner, ensuring it’s valid, and verifiably trusted.

RealBrand enables:

• Ongoing monitoring of how your numbers appear across carriers and networks

• Detection of spoofing attempts and number misuse

• Remediation of incorrect labels that erode answer rates

• Registry-backed RTU validation to prove that the number belongs to your institution

Together, these features support full end-to-end call authentication, from routing integrity to brand verification.

One institution that adopted RealBrand discovered that several outbound service numbers, all technically STIR/SHAKEN-compliant, were still being marked as spam by certain carriers. By implementing RealBrand, they gained visibility into how their calls were actually being received, submitted takedown requests for spoofed numbers and validated their ownership credentials across all platforms.

The result? Higher customer engagement restored confidence in their voice outreach and fewer delays in fraud response windows.

Call authentication is no longer just about telecom compliance. It’s about signaling legitimacy in an era where customer trust is earned before the first word is spoken.

RealBrand gives institutions the visibility and control they need to secure that trust, tying each number back to its authorized user and every call back to its rightful source.

To learn how RealBrand supports secure, visible and verifiable calls – and helps your institution lead in voice channel trust – connect with the Somos team at connect@somos.com. Let’s build a voice ecosystem where authentication is just the beginning.