During our recent webinar, Glyn Povah from Telefónica shared these figures and they genuinely surprised us:
The average call center call is estimated to cost $0.75 to $1.50 per minute and caller authentication alone often takes 4–5 minutes.
That means many companies are spending several dollars on every single call just to verify identity, before they even start solving the customer’s problem.
Additionally, the voice channel has become one of the most exploited attack surfaces because its most common authentication methods — security questions and one-time passwords — are vulnerable to impersonation, SIM swaps, phishing, and caller ID spoofing.
In our joint pilot with GSMA, Telefónica and TMT ID, we demonstrated how callers can authenticate themselves in seconds using a digital identity.
How the flow works:
1) A customer calls support as usual.
2) The call center’s automated system (IVR) triggers a secure push notification to the customer’s phone.
3) The customer unlocks their ID wallet using biometrics (for example, Face ID).
4) They see a message asking them to confirm they’re speaking with support.
5) One tap to confirm, and the call center immediately knows they’re speaking with the legitimate account holder.
Authentication goes from minutes to seconds.
Today, we’re using a standalone ID wallet for the pilot. In a production setup, these same capabilities would be embedded directly into the company’s existing app, whether that’s a telco app, banking app, etc.
The result is simple but important: no security questions, no shared secrets, and no sensitive information spoken out loud to a call center agent.
Behind the scenes, this is powered by digital identity and mobile network trust:
- The mobile operator issues a cryptographically secure digital ID credential proving phone number ownership.
- The credential is stored under the user’s control in their wallet (on their device).
- The call center can verify the proof without contacting the operator, using open standards.
- Network risk signals (like recent SIM swaps) can be checked via telco APIs to strengthen security.
The result is faster authentication, stronger protection against impersonation fraud, and much better privacy for customers.
When you do the math for organizations handling hundreds of thousands of calls per month, the potential cost savings are enormous. And at the same time, this model closes one of the biggest security gaps in today’s call center operations: impersonation fraud.
If you’d like to explore the architecture, or discuss what Trusted Caller ID could look like in your own environment, just reply to this email.
