Insights

Label Remediation vs. Brand Repair: What Financial Institutions Can Actually Control

Aug 13, 2025

It doesn’t always start with a spoofed call. 
Sometimes, the damage begins with a real one.

Your team places a call to a customer. It’s legitimate: a fraud alert, a follow-up or a time-sensitive notification. But the customer doesn’t answer. Later, when they check their phone, they explain why: “It showed up as Spam Likely.”

That one phrase — powered by a carrier label or analytics algorithm — derailed the conversation before it began. And it’s happening more often than you think.

Every mislabeled call creates a ripple effect. Customers miss critical messages. Call centers see an uptick in inbound confusion. Fraud teams lose momentum on urgent cases. Over time, even the most well-run outreach campaigns begin to suffer from something more challenging to diagnose: a trust problem.

These mislabels don’t just block calls. They chip away at confidence.

For financial institutions, where reputation is hard-won and easily shaken, every call is a moment to either build or erode trust. When your institution’s name starts showing up next to a spam warning, even on one network or for one customer segment, that’s more than a technical issue — it’s a brand integrity concern.

The reason these mislabels happen isn’t always malicious. Often, they’re the result of call behavior — high-volume campaigns, frequent retries, inconsistent caller ID formatting — that inadvertently triggers spam filters or heuristic labeling. However, even unintentional patterns can damage how your institution is perceived.

Legitimate outreach starts getting caught in the same net designed to catch bad actors.

And the systems making these determinations? They’re fragmented. Call labeling is driven by a mix of carrier policies, third-party analytics providers and crowd-sourced consumer reports. That lack of standardization makes it difficult for institutions to even know how their calls are being labeled, let alone correct the issue.

All of this is happening in an environment where consumer trust is already strained. In 2024, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported over $70 million in losses from phishing and spoofing schemes alone. That kind of environment makes every unexpected call feel suspect. So when your bank’s fraud team makes a legitimate call, customers hesitate. They don’t just wonder, “Is this real?”, they assume it’s not.

The margin for error is shrinking.

But the good news is you’re not powerless. While you may not be able to rewrite how every carrier or app labels a call, you can take proactive steps to ensure your numbers are monitored, managed, and aligned with best practices.

That’s exactly what RealBrand enables.

With RealBrand™, financial institutions can finally gain a clear view of how their numbers are appearing across the telecom ecosystem — not just what number is being used but how that number is being labeled, interpreted, and, in some cases, misrepresented.

By allowing your teams to monitor call labeling in real time, RealBrand helps detect issues before the customer. Whether it’s a number suddenly flagged as “Spam Likely” or an outbound line showing inconsistent behavior across carriers, RealBrand provides early warning and action paths.

And when a number is mislabeled? RealBrand offers a direct route to submit remediation requests, backed by authoritative number data. That means no more guesswork, no more reactive firefighting — just actionable control.

It’s also a critical tool for fraud and customer experience teams working to coordinate outreach. RealBrand allows institutions to flag high-risk numbers before campaigns launch, monitor them midstream and adjust outreach strategies based on live feedback.

How Institutions Are Closing the Gap

One institution discovered that nearly 20% of their loan servicing calls were being marked as potential spam on specific mobile networks. RealBrand helped them uncover that trend, remediate labeling issues and build a proactive labeling strategy that aligned with their broader communication goals.

The result? Answer rates improved, complaint volume dropped and trust started to rebuild — not because of a new script or a different tone, but because the call looked the way it should have all along.

At a time when consumer trust in voice communications is being tested, institutions that step up to manage their caller ID presence are already setting themselves apart. They’re not waiting for regulations to catch up. They’re not relying solely on STIR/SHAKEN to clean up call reputation. They’re investing in visibility, because they know that what a customer sees on their screen is often the deciding factor in whether they pick up.

RealBrand helps make sure they do.

Ready to take back control of how your institution’s calls are being labeled? Connect with the Somos team at connect@somos.com to learn how RealBrand gives you the tools to monitor, manage and protect your brand — one number at a time.