Smartnumbers

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Company Description

We protect your organisation by ensuring your voice network stays secure. By authenticating callers and detecting fraudsters in real-time, before the call is answered, we create a frictionless caller experience for your customers.

As a software company with a telecommunications pedigree, we create market-leading voice resilience, security, and compliance solutions. It’s why more than a thousand organisations trust us.

Products and Services

Preventing fraud in the contact centre by identifying suspicious calls and authenticating legitimate customers before you answer. This enables you to divert potentially fraudulent calls to specialist teams and create a frictionless caller experience for genuine customers.

Smartnumbers technology assigns a risk score to calls by examining more than 200 features derived from carrier-level call signalling data pre-answer. Each incoming call is tagged in real-time with the level of risk the call represents, such as:

  • Spoofed numbers
  • Withheld calls
  • Call type, such as VoIP
  • Calls from bad actors, including calls where the presentation ID is withheld
  • Calls from international locations
  • Suspicious behaviour such as repeat calls, especially from withheld numbers

Real-time reporting & visual insights

Smartnumbers provides you with real-time reports to show details about suspicious characteristics to enable you to identify trends and changes in fraudulent behaviour, for example:

  • The number of calls received and the number of high-risk calls.
  • Visual representations of the volume, type and the country of origin of suspicious calls.
  • Carrier level call meta-data and risk indicators for every call.

Fraud consortium

We provide you with proactive, real-time protection from confirmed fraudsters who have attacked other Smartnumbers users.

As a Smartnumbers customer, you receive instant access to the fraud consortium, a dedicated telephone fraud network, focused on sharing fraud intelligence to spot emerging contact centre fraud threats.

The fraud consortium allows you to share and receive details about validated fraudsters in real-time, enabling you to keep track of changing malicious behaviour within your industry and cross-sector.

Fraud investigate

Our fraud investigation capability provides insight into the scale and behaviour of individual fraudsters.

Smartnumbers technology creates a unique profile of each caller. This can be used to discover related calls from the same fraudster even when they have withheld their phone number. It also enables you to identify other accounts they have targeted.

Key Differentiators

Allowlist

The allowlist ensures that calls from internal numbers are automatically treated as low risk.

Call authenticity analysis

The Smartnumbers authenticity machine learning model compares the call signalling pattern to confirmed genuine and spoofed calls to determine whether the incoming phone number can be trusted.

Call signalling analysis

As a registered telecoms network operator, Smartnumbers has access to analyse privileged information about calls.

Smartnumbers uses machine learning models to analyse the network-level telephony data to identify whether calls are genuine or high-risk. This includes the detection of number spoofing, repeat withheld callers, calls from known fraudsters, unusual call characteristics such as VoIP and calls with malicious signalling patterns from high-risk countries. The models are updated with repudiation data to continuously improve detection accuracy, adapt to increasingly sophisticated fraud attacks and defend against the changing tactics of fraudsters.

The result is a slicker caller experience for customers. By increasing caller assurance, higher-risk service options can be moved into the IVR which further improves customer experience and cost efficiencies. Alternatively for agent answered calls, they can focus on delivering better service to customers rather than interrogating the callers’ integrity.

Analysis takes place upstream from the contact centre (pre-IVR) and include 100% of all inbound calls into the contact centre. The output of the analysis is a risk score, which can be used to make real-time decisions on high-risk calls and to streamline the authentication of trusted callers before the call is answered.

Denylist

Using the denylist it is possible to mark callers as known bad actors. Future calls received from the caller can be automatically handled (e.g. rerouted to a specialist team), even if the caller withholds or spoofs their number.

Fraud consortium

The Smartnumbers fraud consortium prevents cross-organisation fraud attacks by sharing actionable insights about confirmed fraudsters, in real-time. When an organisation identifies a fraudster that has targeted them, this caller is flagged. Other consortium members are immediately alerted to incoming calls from the same individual, even if they spoof or withhold their phone number. These calls can either be flagged or diverted to a specialist team pre-answer, exposing the fraudster and stopping them in their tracks.

Fraudster tracking

Monitor known fraudsters and track key insights such as their method of attack (MO) and what should be done when they call again. 

Security insights

Smartnumbers provides visual representations of the characteristics and geographic sources of suspicious calls encountered over time, enabling the identification of trends and changes in fraudulent caller behaviour. Smartnumbers also provides detailed information on every call analysed by the service, including the call metadata, risk scores and risk reasons.