Insights

Webinar Recap: Collaborating for Confidence: Applying the Trust Framework Across Industries

Mar 27, 2026

Trust is the foundation of every successful customer interaction. But as fraud and spoofing risks keep rising, trust is harder to earn and easier to lose, especially across voice and messaging. That’s why Somos hosted the third installment in the Somos Trust Framework webinar series: Collaborating for Confidence: Applying the Trust Framework Across Industries, a moderated discussion on how the Trust Framework delivers real value across the telecom and financial ecosystems through its three pillars:

• Privacy

• Consent

• Presentation.

Moderated by Ryan Karnas, Senior Director of Product Management at Somos, the webinar featured Stacy Graham, Trust and Assurance Policy Director at Sinch and Guy Pearson, Senior Vice President at Bank of America. Together, they explored what trusted communications means in practice and why collaboration between service providers, enterprises and financial institutions is essential to restore consumer confidence.

Why a Trust Framework is Needed Now

From a financial institution perspective, trust means customers can be confident a call or message truly comes from their bank, not an impersonator. From a service provider perspective, trust depends on an ecosystem where identities are verified, traffic is monitored and policies are enforced so consumers can rely on communications to be legitimate and secure.

Customer communications have evolved quickly, often faster than the controls designed to protect them. Consumers are overwhelmed by spoofed numbers, impersonation attempts and inconsistent branding, making it harder to distinguish legitimate outreach from fraud.

The panel highlighted several drivers behind the need for a shared framework:

• Social engineering tactics that move across channels
• Fragmented policies and regulations across markets
• Evasion techniques that make purely reactive controls harder to sustain

A key takeaway for financial institutions: phone numbers function as identity signals. When phone numbers are misused or impersonated, the likelihood of social engineering scams increases and customer confidence drops. Even when other controls are working, customers who suspect manipulation disengage and may ignore legitimate outreach, creating downstream operational, fraud and servicing impacts.

Privacy: Building Protection into the Ecosystem

Privacy was positioned as a foundational pillar of the Trust Framework. Service providers support privacy by:

• Limiting data collection

• Protecting it with strong safeguards

• Tightly controlling access while still enabling fraud and abuse prevention

When multiple ecosystem players are involved, privacy by design becomes a shared operating model, with clear purpose limits and consistent protections as data moves across complex networks.

Consent: Clarity That Preserves Trust

Consent is just as critical. When consent signals are unclear or inconsistent, trust degrades at every layer, from customer experience to regulatory confidence. The panel emphasized that enterprises and brands play a direct role in honoring consent by maintaining accurate, real-time records and ensuring outbound communications align with what customers have agreed to.

Two common breakdowns the panel called out:

• Customers receiving messages they didn’t expect
• Customers missing time-sensitive messages they need

Presentation: Trust Cues That Shape Customer Behavior

Verified identity, a clear call reason and consistent branded presentation can increase confidence and engagement. When those cues are missing, inaccurate or spoofed, recipients lose the ability to reliably identify who is contacting them and over time, they stop trusting what they see, even when it is accurate.

What improves outcomes:

• Verified caller identity and purpose indicators
• Consistent branding across channels

What increases risk:

• Missing or inaccurate presentation elements
• Spoofed identifiers that create confusion and call avoidance

Collaboration Makes Trust Work

Trust isn’t built by one company or one technology. The panel described effective collaboration as operating together: financial institutions identify where scams land and where money is moving, enterprises see how brands are being abused and service providers see how traffic flows across networks. Shared intelligence, aligned verification standards and faster cross-channel remediation help reduce the gaps attackers exploit.

Quick Wins to Improve Trust

Panelists shared a few quick wins organizations can prioritize in the next 30-60 days to strengthen trust in customer communications, starting with getting clearer control over the numbers customers associate with your brand:

• Prioritize call spoof protection as a high-impact step to reduce calls that impersonate your brand

• Start by mapping how your organization communicates today across voice and text

• Build visibility into your phone number inventory, including which numbers are used most and which are publicly associated with your brand

• Identify the numbers customers are most likely to trust, like those printed on cards, listed online or used for outbound outreach

• Use that prioritized list as your starting pool for protections like spoof prevention and related trust controls

Keep The Conversation Going

To learn more about the Trust Framework, download our whitepaper and reach out to connect@somos.com to continue the discussion. And stay tuned for Part Four of our Trust Framework webinar series!

Somos Trust Framework Webinar Series:

STIR/SHAKEN 101:
Demystifying Call Authentication for a
Trusted Telecom Ecosystem
Building End-to-End Trust: Diving into a Next-Generation Framework