First Orion, TNS and TransUnion Partnership Helps Standardize Enterprise Vetting and End-to-End Call Authentication Across Branded Calling Ecosystem

First Orion, Transaction Network Services (TNS) and TransUnion (NYSE: TRU) announced their partnership—in effect since 2022— will deliver an estimated five billion branded business calls by the end of 2024. Through direct network integration with leading U.S. wireless carriers, the partnership offers enterprises a proven cross-carrier solution for business vetting, number verification, end-to-end call authentication and call branding with rich call content.

The solution helps enterprises improve customer engagement, while protecting consumers from robocalls, call spoofing and fraud. In addition, this partnership has helped enable milestones that continue to set a strong foundation for future branded call enhancements, including:

• Branded calling adoption by over 4,000 U.S. businesses, including 10% of Fortune 500 companies
• Over 1.5 billion calls branded in 2024 to date
• Business number registration includes more than 180,000 businesses and 17 million phone numbers
• Implementation of standards and best practices that ensure participants in the branded calling ecosystem deliver scalable solutions
• Adoption of solutions to prevent spoofed calls from reaching consumers
• Out-of-band call authentication across the three major mobile networks, enhancing call security with call authentication and rich call content

“Missed connections have a negative impact on businesses and consumers, and consumers are demanding more protection against fraud,” said Joe Stinziano, president and CEO at First Orion. “Through this partnership, we’ve been able to offer businesses the expertise and solutions they need to help protect consumers and restore trust and transparency in the phone call.”

“Businesses need to protect their customers and don’t want their brand reputation damaged by spoofed calls,” said Dennis Randolph, president of TNS Communications Market and chief financial officer for TNS. “Not only does branded calling and spoof protection help modernize the voice channel, customers are also more likely to trust the call which has a direct impact on conversion rates and ROI. By leveraging Out-of-Band capability APIs, only verified calls receive the full enterprise branded call treatment.

“To really have a significant reduction in robocalls, call spoofing and fraud, we had to provide end-to-end call authentication,” said James Garvert, senior vice president of TruContact Communications Solutions at TransUnion. “Our network forensics indicated that only about 35% of business calls to consumers were being authenticated end-to-end with STIR/SHAKEN. Now, through this partnership, along with rich content and spoof protection solutions, we can help stop spoofed calls before they reach the customer.”

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently reported that phone channel fraud cost consumers an average of $1,480 per instance in 2023. Consumers are demanding solutions that address this growing problem, and enterprises are responding.  The adoption of branded calling in the U.S. grew more than seven-fold between 2021-2023.