Despite evolving technologies and regulations, the voice channel remains plagued by robocall scams, illegal spoofing, and outdated technologies that continue to enable fraud. It’s a fragmented landscape where consumers don’t trust the voice channel and legitimate businesses still struggle to stand out as verified, while bad actors continue to exploit weaknesses in outdated systems.
How do consumers know that they can trust a branded call display, whether it’s just a caller name or if it has a logo? What part of the display signals trust?
It’s time to move beyond the surface-level appeal of branded call visuals. The real solution lies in caller identity integrity—built on a foundation of verification, secure transmission, and consistent presentation.
To kick off the SIP Forum’s 2025 Branded Calling Summit, Numeracle’s President and COO, Mary Clark, joined by Brett Nemeroff, VP of Engineering, introduced Branded Calling IDTM (BCID TM)—an industry-standardized solution developed with the CTIA to fix the fragmented branded calling ecosystem and bring verifiable trust back to phone calls.
While branded visuals like logos are designed to inspire trust, their presence alone cannot guarantee the authenticity of a call. So, BCID is more than just branding — it provides a cohesive and trustworthy experience for consumers by ensuring that calls from vetted sources display verified brand information, such as company name, logo, and call intent. Its goal is to protect the integrity of the voice channel while building consumer trust in phone calls.
Fraud thrives in the absence of verified identity and bad actors seem to have a talent for identity manipulation in particular, exploiting weak technologies, like CNAM, to convince you they are a different identity. Bad actors understand the flaws and weaknesses of such technologies, enough to exploit those weaknesses to impersonate and defraud.
These legacy technologies offer no real verification of caller identity, and while logos and branded visuals are helpful in signaling trust, the lack of authentication allows scammers to easily spoof legitimate numbers, deceiving consumers into answering fraudulent calls.
“The real issue is that there is no caller authentication mechanism built into the voice network. Scammers understand the technology and implement it before we're ready.”
— Brett Nemeroff, VP of Engineering – Voice; Numeracle
How BCID Solves: The BCID ecosystem is comprised of Authorized Partners, like Numeracle, who are vetted and audited against
a set of stringent industry-driven requirements. The ecosystem is built to authenticate callers and use Know Your Customer (KYC) practices to vet their brand information before it reaches the consumer — the first step toward a secure, branded calling experience.
Once identity is verified, the next challenge is maintaining its integrity across transmission. Current STIR/SHAKEN protocols help, but they don’t cover the full scope of branded calling, especially when multiple service providers are involved in the call path. Secure, end-to-end identity integrity requires authenticated call delivery every step of the way.
“One of the great things about STIR/SHAKEN is it made us think about cryptography in phone calls. We need a way to authenticate and securely present that identity so the person on the other end can trust who’s calling.”
— Brett Nemeroff, VP of Engineering – Voice; Numeracle
How BCID Solves: Branded Calling ID ensures authenticated delivery of vetted brand information, securely embedding this verified identity data into each call through STIR/SHAKEN Rich Call Data (RCD). This allows the caller's identity information to stay intact throughout transmission, from origination to termination.
Even with verified identity and secure transmission, if the branded information isn’t displayed correctly on the consumer’s device, trust is lost. Today, consumers receive a confusing array of visuals, often with conflicting logos or inconsistent displays due to multiple competing solutions or outdated branding methods. This fragmentation undermines the trust branded calling is supposed to deliver.
A complete solution must ensure that what’s seen on the phone screen is exactly what was authenticated—no alterations, no conflicting information, and no misleading branding.
How BCID Solves: BCID’s unified, standards-based presentation displays verified names, logos, and call reason — consistently displayed natively by the device with no consumer-downloaded app required. Plus, Android phones display “Verified Business Call” along with the logo to signal that this is more than a branded call that they can feel confident in answering. Consumers are empowered with the information they need to confidently answer or decline a call.
It’s critical for the industry to continue its collaborative efforts to protect this new form of secure branded identity display before it becomes another technology that can be exploited by bad actors.
If other competing technologies are allowed to natively present without KYC, vetting, verification, rigor, and cryptography behind the presentation, then this type of logo presentation will be abused, and consumers will learn they can't trust this method either and continue to distrust the voice channel.
Brett posed a critical question during the session: “Does your solution meet all three pillars?” Most don’t, but BCID does. BCID represents one of the first comprehensive solutions to the challenges plaguing branded calling today. It was built to uphold all three pillars of trusted communications:
By supporting these pillars, BCID creates a secure ecosystem where enterprises can protect their brand integrity, and consumers can regain confidence in the calls they receive.
If you're ready to secure your brand's voice and lead the charge in trusted communications, reach out to Numeracle to get started today.
