Webinar recording — Branded Calling for Service Providers

November 22, 2024

TransNexus presented an education webinar, Branded Calling for Voice Service Providers, on Thursday, November 21, 2024. This blog post provides a recording and materials from the webinar.

The demand for branded calling among businesses and organizations is robust, for the following reasons:

Dramatically improves the likelihood that their outbound calls will be answered.
Caller identity is more accurate than CNAM.
Eliminates SPAM Likely tags, so calls get through.

In the past, branded calling providers have sold their services directly to enterprises, bypassing voice service providers.

With the new Branded Calling ID (BCID) platform and ecosystem, originating and terminating service providers can participate in and generate revenue from providing this service to their customers.

In this webinar, our presenters explain how it works and the next steps to participate.

Agenda

Introduction to the Branded Calling ID (BCID) ecosystem
How an Originating Service Provider can offer BCID services to its customers with the help of an onboarding and vetting agent
TransNexus Signing Agent services
Next steps for voice service providers to join the BCID ecosystem

Presenters

Jim Dalton
Chief Executive Officer
TransNexus

John Marinho
VP, Cybersecurity & Technology
CTIA

Mark Bilton-Smith
Chief Executive Officer
NumHub

Alec Fenichel
Chief Technology Officer
TransNexus

Slides

Here are the slides used in the webinar presentation.

Questions and answers

We’ve summarized and consolidated questions we received during the webinar and provided answers here. Contact us if you have further questions.

If we have an enterprise customer who wants their calls branded, would our customer be required to work directly with the Vetting Agents?: No, your customer would either work with you directly, or you could arrange to have your customer work with the Onboarding Agent. Either way, the Onboarding Agent works with the Vetting Agent.
If we have this setup, am I understanding correctly that CNAM dips (and thus CNAM storage) become unnecessary?: Yes, you would not perform a CNAM dip for branded calls that you terminate. Instead of paying for a CNAM dip, you would use the branded calling information and be paid for displaying it to your subscriber. Branded calling probably would not eliminate CNAM dips, because not every call you terminate would be branded, but it would reduce your CNAM expense.
Is it possible for a TSP to not be part of the BCID ecosystem but still support STIR/SHAKEN?: Yes. A terminating provider would still verify the STIR/SHAKEN information as required by law. If the TSP is not participating in BCID, then that’s the end of it. If the TSP is participating in BCID, then they would also display the branding information to their subscriber, report this to the BCID platform, and be paid for that.
Will this eliminate circumstances where legitimate outbound calls are labeled as Spam on consumer devices?: Most likely yes, if the terminating provider is participating in BCID. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which a participating TSP would use a SPAM likely label from an analytics provider instead of the vetted brand information from the BCID ecosystem used to authenticate the call.
Is there a way to quantify calls labeled as Spam on consumer devices today vs. after implementing Branded Calling?: The BCID platform provides detailed reporting to support analysis after implementing it. You would have to find a way to quantify SPAM labeling before implementation to perform this analysis.
How does a customer get their certification revoked? Called party complaints or blocking calls? For example, a collection company signs up for the service and is vetted. The called parties hate getting their calls for obvious reasons. So the concern is could an industry like this have their cert revoked even though their calls are legit?: A BCID participant could have their BCID membership revoked for violating the terms and conditions of their membership. If the customer abided by the laws and terms and conditions, then it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which they would have their certification revoked only on the basis of customer complaints.
What if the OSP is using a TN that is leased from a 3rd party?: As long as the association between the caller, calling number, and brand information is properly onboarded and vetted, then number leasing arrangements can still use branded calling.
Is this supported out of band, to address when S/S packets are dropped?: The TransNexus ClearIP and NexOSS platforms support out-of-band SHAKEN, in which the SHAKEN PASSporT is sent around non-IP segments over the internet. This functionality will be updated soon to include the additional BCID capabilities.
Is there a maximum number of Phone Numbers that can be associated with a brand/certificate?: No, we are not aware of any such limitations.
Is there an NFR/Demo product available for a service provider to set themselves up with for testing, vetting, demos, etc.?: If your company is already using a TransNexus software platform for STIR/SHAKEN (e.g., ClearIP or NexOSS), the next steps are to join the BCID ecosystem, upgrade NexOSS if necessary, set it up, and choose an Onboarding Agent to work with, such as NumHub, for example. If you are using another platform for STIR/SHAKEN, then we can discuss trial arrangements for our platforms.
In terms of pricing, if a call is Authenticated via the BCID process, will it incur a STI Authentication charge AND a BCID Authentication charge?: No, it would be one or the other.
is image/icon limited to bmp?: Currently, yes, BMP file with 256x256 pixels.
Since it is a BCID Signature being sent to the SIP PROVIDER, how does Attestation and traceback since it will not be linked to our Stir/Shaken Certificate: Calls attested by an OSP will still be linked to their SHAKEN certificate, the certificate issued by the CTIA certificate authority.
Just for confirmation, if a Brand logo is not delivered by the terminating SP, no charges apply--ONLY calls where the Brand logo is displayed on the called party’s phone will be charged?: If the TSP displays the branded caller name to the called party, then BCID charges apply, otherwise, no. A participating TSP would also display the logo image and call reason, if provided, on supported handsets.
Are all the mobile operators a TSP?: T-Mobile and Verizon are testing BCID. We cannot confirm information about AT&T and BCID at this time.
Is the BCID info sent for emergency calls? Will it overwrite the CNAM or CID being used in the PAI or FROM URI?: Their are rules for emergency calls and STIR/SHAKEN, and those also apply to SHAKEN calls with BCID. Outbound calls from an emergency response center would only be branded if they choose to do that.
Do these customer’s calls with the shaken certificate also get an A attestation because it is registered?: Yes. Per the Rich Call Data standards, calls should not be branded unless they qualify for A-level attestation. The BCID vetting process satisfies those conditions, so all branded calls qualify for A-level attestation.
i assume that adding this feature on NexOSS is a simple software upgrade?: Yes, upgrade and configuration. Outside of the software considerations, there are also operational steps to join the BCID ecosysstem.
Are only USA ANIs able to use Branded Calling? I know the FCC order for SHAKEN only applies to USA-NANP numbers.: Yes.

Transcript

Here’s a lightly-edited transcript of the webinar presentation.

Jim Dalton [0:0:8]: So this I’m Jim Dalton with TransNexus.; And today, we’re gonna be talking about branded calling and what it does, you know, for if you’re a service provider, what it means for you?; Because this is a, it’s really a big new develop for development for service providers enabling new revenues, but really providing new services for for enterprise customers and small businesses that they’re asking for.; So let me start off.; I’ve got some guest speakers that are going to join me today.; If I didn’t say earlier, I’m Jim Dalton with TransNexus and three really important people to tell you about branded calling, how it works and what it means. Happy to have John Marinho. He is an expert in branded calling.; He really has been on the ground floor of developing this really momentous achievement in terms of commercial terms of what it enables for service providers.; So I’ll let John tell you a little bit about you know, the framework that they’ve implemented and what it’s all about.; And Mark Bilton-Smith, he’s with us from Numhub and Numhub is what you’ll learn about today is an onboarding agent and they they are really. They’re the folks that enable you as service providers to get your branded calling information for your customers into the ecosystem and to make.; Sure, it’s vetted.; It’s really a critical role. It takes a heavy load off a server service providers to make that happen, and I think you probably know Alec Fenichel, our CTO.; He’s a bona fide expert in SIP security and anything related to shaking, and he’s been very, very involved in the early days of the implementation of bcid as a signing agent that we offer as a service writer with our ClearIP solution and with our on premises software, NexOSS.; So let me just mention for you know I think.; They’re next to s s and ClearIP customers on our call today.; This call is going to be primarily.; Talking about how to use branded calling and ClearIP if you’re an Exos customer and you’re not using branded calling yet, and by the way, we already have a couple of customers in production using NEXOS for a branded calling. Everything you hear today will apply to next 0.; But you’ll need to contact us.; The processes are a little bit different.; We may need to upgrade your software, but we’ll lead you through the process to get started with Brandy calling very quickly.; So Brandon calling, if you don’t know what it is.
Alec Fenichel [0:2:37]: Sorry, just I see there’s a hand raised. If you have any questions, please put them in the Q&A panel and we’ll get to them at the end.
Jim Dalton [0:2:46]: Alec, thank you for that.; I appreciate that. Good point.; So if you don’t know what Brandy calling is, this this picture really sums it up.; It’s the way that a calling party, an enterprise or a small business, they can get their calls answered and their calls are going to get answered because the folks they call, they’re going to trust that call.; They’re going to know it’s important to them.; They’re going to know why they’re being called and they’re going to answer it.; And this is what this technology is all about, actually the technology.; Technology is not new.; I’m gonna talk about just a minute, but it’s this ecosystem that’s been developed by CTIA that enables this for calling parties to be able to see this information and trust the identity of who’s calling.; And that’s what’s very powerful for service providers to be able to offer to their enterprise customers for the very first time.; So let me you know, why is Brandon calling important?; It’s important because we’ve been hearing this for over two years.; You know, we serve service providers. Your customers are are asking for branded calling.; You can’t deliver it.; The demand is out there.; It’s robust. All kinds of business, obviously.; Big Enterprise customers want it, but also down to small enterprises, small customers. They need to be able to talk to their customers and branding branded calling enables that for them. And you as a service provider can make it happen.; And what’s nice?; You’re going to see when Alec goes through ClearIP.; There is no two new technology here, just some configuration changes through the user interface.; It’s a very easy process if you’ve already implemented shaken and what is new though, is the commercial framework that we’re gonna talk about.; I’m gonna ask John to explain a little bit more about this in just a moment. But what CTI has done is they’ve taken this technology that’s been around for years, shaking in the ability to put brand information in a shaken passport.; Nobody uses it.; They didn’t trust it.; They put together a commercial framework.; For an ecosystem that anybody can join, if you step up to the responsibilities and requirements of what it takes to be part of the trusted ecosystem, and that’s what’s really powerful.; It’s not new technology, it’s just a new way of doing business in a trusted way with counterparts other service providers like yourself that you know you can trust.; And that’s what’s powerful it’s enabling.; You as a service provider to sell branded calling to your enterprises directly.; You control the enterprise account.; You control their experience, you build them directly.; We’re here and that’s what service providers want, and that’s what’s really exciting. We think for our customers to be able to do this.; So let’s talk.; I want to stop here and hand it over to John.; This trust ecosystem, what is this?; Well, you know what’s Jim talking about?; You’re going to learn.; It’s the number of legal agreements and you know.; There are required responsibilities and you need to step up and do and put your name on and that’s a good thing.; You know, you might look at it and say, Gee whiz, I can’t believe all these requirements.; You wouldn’t join this ecosystem if you didn’t know all your peers and colleagues weren’t held to the same requirements as you are in terms of being able to trust your calls.; So I’m going to stop there and John, I want to hand it over to you to just, you know, tell all of our listeners here.; Tell us about the the CTA ecosystem.; The Bcid ecosystem that you all created.
John Marinho [0:6:21]: Thanks, Jim, and thank you all for the opportunity today to share with you what CTIA, the Trade Association has been doing with folks in the industry for a number of years to solve a fundamental problem that our Members brought to us to try and bring together this trust.; Ecosystem to solve a very important issue in the United States, there’s over 33 million businesses.; And those businesses all make phone calls to their customers.; Challenges is that today, unless you’re in a contact list of a particular customer, 80% of those calls go unanswered.; That is a fundamental problem that the industry was facing in the sense that consumers lost confidence and they lost trust in the ability to answer their phones and to trust who’s on the other side that they’re not going to be spoofed, that they’re not going to be subject.; To a scam or a spam activity or other related activities.; That we’ve seen bad actors try to use.; And to exploit.; The telephone communications network in the United States.; So we embark on this journey a number of years ago, but as you heard from Jim, leveraging what’s already been done with Ster shaken to stir shaken is fundamentally a cryptographic technique.; To authenticate the parties that are transacting phone calls across the network.; But one of the fundamental problems that we were trying to address is that you’ve got to start with information that has been properly.; Collected has been gone through a vetting process that’s trusted, and then you can aggregate that information and provide it downstream to the different players in the ecosystem so that when that information shows up on a phone like you saw earlier, it’s information that’s trusted, it’s information that the.; Consumer recognizes and it conveys and uses the technology that’s already in place and was mandated by Congress, was mandated by the FCC.; But adds another layer on top of that which is.; Companies that are like minded can participate in an open, transparent and trusted ecosystem based upon a common set of rules. A common set of guidelines, and you can tell the difference between the information that comes from bcid versus any other information that’s coming across from other parts of.; The network, and indeed if you know it’s trusted, then the OS PS and the TS PS are in a much better position to.; Serve up this trusted solution to enterprise customers.; And those roles that we’ve defined are a set of guidelines, a set of requirements that can apply to originating service providers, terminating service providers, the onboarding and vetting agents and focus on hub who are participating in the work that we’ve doing as well as the signing agents that.; Or the engine. That kind of drives a lot of this in terms of using that aggregate information, putting it into the stir shaken technology that’s already been deployed again through congressional mandate across the country. But raising it up a level.; So there’s a very high degree of trust and an opportunity for the carrier to collect a fee for the display, in particular the TSP fees.; That are part of the solution that are for the most part nominal.; But yet provide a high value solution to those 33 million enterprises and we’ve actually gone live as October 1st with a large selection of companies that we’re working with.; There’s currently over 30 plus companies that are part of the ecosystem and growing growing everyday.; Everyday we’re adding more OS PS.; We’re also working with the national tsps that are part of the solution.; We’ve been live with T-Mobile since October 1st.; We’re in the process of testing with Verizon and then of course we can expect AT&T sometime in 2025 and the the ecosystem control continues to grow again day by day. And so do call volumes because we actually have live brands that are sending live.; Calls to their customers that see and experience the the.; The displays that you saw earlier that Jim presented so with that?; Jim, let me turn it back to you.
Jim Dalton [0:10:48]: Great. Thank you for sharing all of that and we’re excited you guys have been working so years.; It’s complicated. It’s detailed.; It’s well thought out, and it’s actually pretty simple for service providers. I think the end result there’s a lot under the hood, but for service providers to get started and implement branded calling, I think you’re going to find out is. It’s pretty easy to make money with this.; New business model.; So let me start.; You know, it starts with.; You got to get the branded calling information into the.; System. So the data provisioning part. Let me just kind of explain that to you the steps. So you got an enterprise Oregon small business. They’re asking you for branded calling.; Their information, you know who they are, the details or federal tax number.; You know their legal name?; That information, plus the branding information, needs to get to an onboarding agent, not just anybody can provision this information to the Bcid platform. And that’s what that’s the central platform.; That was, you know, organized by CTIA.; And they control and hold responsible the folks who have signed up to be onboarding agents to let that information into the system. Now as an originating service provider, you know you could send your customer directly to a onboarding agent directly, but you probably don’t want to do that.; You want to maintain control of your customer and and be the interface and onboarding agents really will be the back end tool for you to make that happen.; So while I have an arrow here, it goes straight.; The onboarding agent.; That’s a logical path I think.; The important thing for the OSPS originating service providers, they’re gonna be in control of making that introduction and have the same kind of access as the onboarding agent was to know what their customers have done and the status of their information on how is has it been up.; To the branded calling platform and it won’t get uploaded until it’s been vetted.; And that’s the really, you know, that’s the really linchpin. I think in all of this.; You know, we talked about KYC.; For years, everybody’s got KYC policies, but they’re they’re like a sieve when it comes keeping out bad traffic.; Here vetting is done by an impartial third party.; They’ve got no skin in the game. They’re going to get paid with that company’s vetted or not, and that’s what’s really important.; You know you’ve got a third party that has a lot on the line in terms of what they’ve agreed to to join this ecosystem to make sure that only.; White hat players get into the ecosystem, and that’s a really a critical part that makes you know it makes this trustworthy and makes it valuable.; So you can charge good money for it.; So let me the next thought is.; Once that is done, that information is pulled down to ClearIP ’cause we need that information.; That’s what we’re gonna use to build your branded calling passports. So that’s constantly, you know, ClearIP is checking on that every minute to make sure we’ve got the latest information.; You know, it was you.; Talk to your customer. Two weeks ago it got uploaded.; You know, whenever you’re not sure, but as soon as it’s available, we have it and calls coming in from that customer are going to be branded and this is a one step in ClearIP.; You just need to make mappings between your customers.; Enterprise ID that was given to them and that was assigned by the onboarding agent to the user in ClearIP that you’re providing branded calling service to and Alice gonna show you the details about that in just a minute.; But that’s the data provisioning flow.; Let’s talk about the call flow.; So look at this call flow.; A lot of arrows we’ve, you know, we’ve all looked at these arrows so many times.; Everybody’s been through accepting, testing with us. This is.; Local shaken call flow Call comes in your Switch or SPC.; You send it to ClearIP, we send back the 302 with the shaken passport.; Nothing’s different. You know, you don’t need to change anything in your SBC to do branded calling.; You’re going to go into ClearIP and you’re going to make that mapping that I just described, Alex going to show you.; And there is a little different change you’re going to be signing those bcid passports not with a TransNexus certificate, but with a CTIA certificate.; And that’s a really important.; Part that really glues this together to make sure you can trust these branded calls so that passport you hit ClearIP just like you do do for shaking, we return the passport you put it into your outbound invite to the terminating service provider.; Same process for verification is was shaken.; You send the invite to ClearIP.; We’re going to verify that passport, but we’re going to see there’s rich call data in here that can be used for branding.; We’re going to send that back if.; You’re ATSP and you join the ecosystem.; We’re going to send that information back to you to see.; To your hand, the handset of your customer for display. Now if you’ve got, you know if you’ve got a a wireless handset. Obviously you can show the logo and the call reason, but you know we’re talking to customers and they got soft phones. Those soft phones can show.; Anything. So it’s not just wireless providers that are going to be able to participate in terms of displaying branded call information. It folks with soft phones and also anybody with a landline phone that displays caller ID.; Because the rich call data that’s been signed, the name claims and portal, that’s a very important part of it.; And you can, you know, enterprises will pay to make sure they get their caller name displayed all the way to the end, as opposed to relying on C name.; Which they’re finding very unreliable.; So anyway, that’s the call flow for for branded calling. Couple of new things I’ve mentioned here.; I talked about the branded calling passport.; It’s a shaken passport, just has some rich call data added to it.; But two new things you need to know about.; You know the the signing agent ClearIP.; Or the verification.; General determination side they send signals, they send accounting information to bcid.; How does everybody get paid?; This is all you know at the end of the day, everybody’s got to make something on a telephone call.; So the signing agent confirms I signed these calls and the verification agent confirms these logos were passed and that goes into the Bcid platform, which is a central settlement platform.; So you know the originators owe money.; The Terminators are owed money.; It’s going to be bcid. It determines.; Those settlement payments, and that’s really what leads to this next slide.; What’s the money flow? It all begins with enterprises or small businesses.; I mean, they’re the ones that this has the most valuable for their they will pay their they are ready to pay for this service and they’re going to pay their their OSP or really they’re going to pay the onboarding agent because again the onboarding agent has that special.; Relationship with the Bcid platform to make that payment.; That’s who bcid is expecting to get paid from.; Osp.; But how the OSP works?; That relationship with the onboarding agents.; Up to you.; You can collect the money from your enterprise and then remit to the onboarding agent. They pass it to the Bcid platform or whatever works.; There’s a lot of flexibility in this model and the key thing is the OSP. The service provider is in control of what they want to offer.; They’ve got a lot of flexibility to make it whatever is easiest or best for their marketing plans, and then the last step is the terminating service provider could be you.; You’re gonna get paid for terminating those calls and displaying the brand, and that comes directly from the Bcid platform.; So let’s move on and before I move on, you know, so I kind of showed you the call flows talked about the money flow, we talked.; Provisioning that was kind of new upfront.; So how do you get the data provisioning started?; You need an onboarding agent.; That’s the gatekeeper.; You know you could become an onboarding agent, but you probably don’t want to.; You probably want to get somebody else.; They’ve done all the work. They’ve signed the agreement, they’re on the hook for.; All the responsibilities you probably want to use a third party to do that, and that’s why we’ve asked John to join us, John or Mark.; Mark Bilton Smith.; Excuse me from Nubhub to explain their platform. We’ve worked with them.; They’ve got a nice platform to make it easy for you as a service provider to get your customers information onboarded and submitted in provision to the BCID platform.; So let me stop there and Mark, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, onboard?; And what it does for service providers?
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:19:11]: Sure. Thank you very much, Jim.; That actually was perfect coming into this John and Bcid, everybody’s not aware this has been something in the works for four to five years.; This is a monumental task to get to where we’ve come today and at the end of September T-Mobile a lot, you know, announced.; Live you know a working solution to our industry for the first time ever.; So I’m super excited to be here today and I thank you so much for bringing us in. Jim and I and it’s it’s an honor to have you as a partner as well.; So real quick, just I want to say for 35 years NumHub specialized and authorized right to use ownership toll free numbers for carriers, enterprise businesses, contact centers and telecom.; Resellers, this stuff’s not new to us.; This SAS platform stuff, right?; Five years ago, we became the first NPAC certified local number porting clearinghouse and lsms provider that delivers simplified SaaS platform for local number portability. And today you know we’re honoured to to introduce the first branded calling solution that the industry, it’s it’s industry standard spaced, it works and.; It will make our consumers look forward to answering our calls again.; That’s my slogan and.; And I’m going to stick to it.; So to kick off this slide.; Set the stage.; There’s a lot of information that we can’t share with you all yet, and I’m sorry because you’re not an authorized OSP.; So we’ve chosen to take the path.; Let’s talk about your customer journey.; What happens after, right?; So this slide represents the fact that you are.; An ospa bcid authorized OSP. You’ve engaged with TransNexus for signing.; And you’re using our SaaS platform, OK.; And you’ve onboarded to our SaaS platform.; Those are all important things to start with.; What do we do for our OSP partners?; That’s probably what you want to know today. NumHub provides a simplified SaaS platform that allows OS PS and their agents to onboard vet bill their customers and ensure that legitimate calls are placed to their consumers depending on your.; Your company’s interests, your business objectives.; We offer this platform in a white label solution.; Or we offer this platform in a NUM hub branded solution.; So going to step one.; The OSP or agent registers their customer into the NUM hub platform, right?; And agents too.; So we support agents, you know that that’s a requirement that you all need. The customer will receive a login to create an account and begin their onboarding and vetting journey. OK, all parties will have a dashboard that represents where they’re at in the onboarding and vetting process.; So we all know what’s happening and then of course everybody will be notified when that process is complete, including Jim, the OSP, the reseller, the customer and everybody else.; In Step 2, the customer onboarding and vetting process will begin.; Customer information will be collected to set up their billing credentials and create a unique bcid enterprise ID. That’s what’s used all throughout this process, including, you know, the billing of your individual customers.; The inserting of your passport, all of those things, then a thorough vetting process, will begin to ensure your customers are who they say they are.; Illegitimate calls will be placed to the consumer.; This vetting process takes approximately 10 days.; Could be longer, could be shorting shorter depending on how quick we get this information back. It is a thorough vetting process and there’s a lot of information that’s collected here.; The bidding, the vetting information collected will be loaded into the Bcid settlement platform.; TransNexus can insert that customer logo with a business name, phone number, and call reason into the OS PS outgoing call. I think Jim, you called that passport right?; Good. So in step #3, the customer’s ready to place branded calls and their consumer and their and their and their consumers.; Work consistently without oh, so sorry guys and I am reading a little bit about this stuff.; These calls will be working and showing up consistently, and the reason I mention these these three things without any proprietary software without any additional equipment and without any smartphone application downloads. Just so you guys are aware, the other solutions out there require all that to work.; And that’s why it’s not working.; I’m not sure if anybody’s ever seen a displayed call show up on a phone.; I I’ve got in the in the seven years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve got two people that told me they’ve seen that show up on a phone.; This is not the case with this product, OK?; So setting expectations, I just wanna let everybody know that.; First of all, unlike other solutions, this one works all right.; So that’s the most important thing out of this whole thing.; Please understand that this solution is for businesses that want to place legitimate calls to their consumers.; I say this with with.; This is why our industry is why it is today.; In the mess is the messes that have been created.; I just, you know, if we’re not wanting to place legitimate calls and we’re not, you know, our customers aren’t doing so.; Please don’t take the time to onboard your customers because that passport will be revoked and and their calls will be shut down.; That makes sense.; So even though Bcid has been in the works for years, much like stir shaken, we’re still at the we’re at the very early stages of deployment here, right?; We’re all working on perfecting an automated platform experience, but some of these tasks are still manual, so I just. I want everybody you know to be aware of that, right?; T-Mobile announced.; We’ve already talked about the other things T-Mobile announced GA in September.; That was the greatest day that that I think our industry’s seen in the last 10 years.; I.; I.; I I really think it’s that it.; It’s that monumental we already talked about the fact that Verizon Alpha is complete and the beta will beginning at the beginning of 2025. And we think that hopefully the GA announcement will be at that same time.; And then lastly, sure.
Jim Dalton [0:26:9]: I ask you one quick question, mark.; So I just wanna make sure I got this right ’cause I think this is you know, I think you said I heard this earlier and I wanna make sure I get this right because I think our you know this.; We need a lot for our ClearIP customers if they want to get started with Brandy calling right now.; They they all they need to do is, you know, they need to sign a non disclosure with you.; They need to go to you and you can take their customers information.; You have a portal where they could upload their customer information for branded calling, or they could let their customers do it and then you will run with it from there.; And as soon as it’s if it’s vetted and put into the BI city and the Bcid platform, when that enterprise starts making calls, we’re gonna brand those calls with a shaken bcid passport.; And that’s it.; They’re they’re selling, they’re providing branded calling right now.; Now they can do a whole lot more.; They can productize at their marketing campaigns.; All the rest, but in terms of making it happen right now, is it that simple?
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:27:8]: It’s that simple.; They need to become an OSP.
Jim Dalton [0:27:9]: Alright, that’s good.
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:27:9]: They need to sign up for our platform and we do everything else.
Jim Dalton [0:27:12]: Alright, that’s good. I want to.; I don’t want to run out of time, ’cause. I I know Alec has some things he wants to go over. So, but that’s that’s great, Mark.
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:27:15]: No, no, I apologize.
Jim Dalton [0:27:19]: That’s what I wanted to make sure I heard that right and that people understand it to get started is not hard and if you got ClearIP, just start.; I mean, you just get calls coming across that you’re charging a premium for because they’re branded.; That’s a good business case.; Well, let’s go. Let’s see.
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:27:37]: Yep. And Jim?
Jim Dalton [0:27:37]: Let me.
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:27:38]: Jim, one other thing, if I could at the bottom of this slide is how you get a hold of us to engage and and sign up for the SAS platform. And it’s very important for them to know that.; So just making sure we reference that.
Jim Dalton [0:27:51]: Mark, well, we will bring people your way and introduce them to you personally.; So no doubt about it.; So, well, let’s do this, mark. I thank you for that.; Kind of rush along.; I know we’re a little deadline here.
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:28:1]: Nope.
Jim Dalton [0:28:3]: I wouldn’t have Alec to have a chance to to go through the ClearIP experience and to show folks how does this work in terms of getting this information on the wire.; Alec, do you want to share your screen?
Alec Fenichel [0:28:17]: Sure. Yes, I assume you can see that.
Jim Dalton [0:28:20]: Up.
Alec Fenichel [0:28:22]: Take that as yes so.
Jim Dalton [0:28:23]: Make sure. OK. Thank you.; I see it.
Alec Fenichel [0:28:26]: I’m logged into ClearIP and I’ll walk you through exactly how it is you set it up in clearip.; Most of the people on this call are clearip customers. If you are ANX OSS customer, obviously the pages are slightly different, but it’s it’s fundamentally nearly identical to what we’ve got here in ClearIP.; So before I show you the first thing about bciid certificates, I do want to quickly remind everybody what a regular shaken certificate looks like, right?; You come to this page and you create your certificate.; It’s just pretty simple.; You put in a name for it, your spy your account ID.; Your user ID and your password with the PA course you have to specify whether it’s in the United States or Canada.; So this this process of creating certificates most of you are probably already familiar with. The good news is the process of creating a bcid certificate is identical.; The only difference is there’s not a yield.; So you come to this page and you create your bcid certificate.; You can use the same PA account, same user ID, password that you use in your regular shaken certificate.; Put that in in here and ClearIP will issue or request a certificate from BCID.; Just like with normal shaken certificates, ClearIP automatically renews those certificates before they expire.; You can always come over here.; Take a look at that certificate if you want to.; It’s it’s a very familiar process. I do see a question in here in. In the chat, we get to questions at the end, but I want to bring it up now.; Fundamentally, ABC ID certificate is a shaken certificate.; It’s a subset, right?; So ABC I.; BC ID certificate can be used to sign a passport.; That is then verified by a terminating service provider that doesn’t support bcid.; And it’ll just be treated like any old shaken passport.; So it’s not specific to bcid.; You only get the branding if both the OSP and the TSP support bcid, but you can deploy this even knowing that some of the terminating service fighters or calls will be sent to won’t support bcid yet.; So once you’ve create your created your bcid certificate, it’s a one time thing. Then you come over to this page here in clearip. The Bcid enterprise mappings.; So when you go through that onboarding process with your customers or if your customers go through it directly with an onboarding agent like NUM Hub, they will be assigned an enterprise ID. This uniquely identifies that enterprise within the Bcid ecosystem. And this page is where you map your.; Trunks or your users or or whatever. However you’ve configured your organization within ClearIP, varies based on the platform to those enterprise I DS.; So you can see here I’ve got an example.; I’ve created a mapping for this particular group.; Example group and I’ve map that to this specific enterprise ID.; I’ve also specified which bcid certificate I want to use in Azure, and of course I’ve turned it on.; You can see I’ve left the calling number here blank.; A calling number field blank and what that means is this will apply to all calling numbers.; But it will only work for calling numbers that have been vetted by the vetting agent and uploaded into the Bcid platform.; So you don’t have to manually manage which calling numbers your customers gone through the vetting process with.; It’s all handled automatically on the back end. Of course, if you want to, you could only allow a subset.; I’m not sure there’s a great use case for that, but if you wanted to, you could turn it off for a specific calling number, or really anything in the middle if you wanted to.; And that’s it.; Of course you repeat this process for each one of your enterprises, and that is all you have to do to turn on bcid authentication for your calls.; Clearip will automatically use your bcid certificate to create a shaken passport, with the RCD claims the name the logo, the call reason if that calling number and enterprise have been vetted and put into the BCID platform. If they have not been clear, IP will fall back and perform.; Regular.; Shaken, creating a regular shaken passport and we can take a look at what happens when ClearIP gets a call.; So here I’m looking at a number of of new fields that you may not have seen if you log haven’t logged into Clearip recently.; So we’ve got a call.; It’s got a calling number, a call number, and this particular call. We can see it was successfully authenticated using BCID with a particular certificate.; This is the the service FEDER code of the Certific service provider that signed it.; Origination identifier just like normal.; Shaken but a couple new fields.; Here we’ve got the enterprise ID.; So you know which enterprise that call was associated with the display identity record.; So when the onboarding.; Agent creates an enterprise in the system.; They then create the logo and the name and all that other information into what’s called the display identity record, which is what gets uploaded into the BCID platform.; So when we download that information, we put the ID of that record here, which is useful in the event of an audit.; You can see what that was.; We also put the onboarding agent ID and the vetting agent ID so you know who onboarded and who vetted this information. So if there’s any.; Other question about the accuracy of this information.; You know who who onboarded it and who vetted it?; Let’s take a look at what this looks like in a sip signaling.; It looks identical to a regular old STI authentication generated shaken passport. You can see that here. In this case it’s being returned as an identity header just like you normally you can in ClearIP for regular shaken you can go in you know and change it whether it.; Be an embedded header, an X identity header or whatever is applicable to your platform.; Those same controls apply both to bcid and regular shaken.; We’ve added a new tab here.; This BCI authentication tab that shows you your BCID passport. Let’s take a look at this passport.; I’m not gonna walk through everything. Just gonna highlight what’s different from the normal shaken passport so we can see. We’ve got this new claim RCD and in there it’s two things, icon ICN and name and AM.; So the icon is a link to the to the icon. It’s Bmps 2256 by 256 and then the name is the name.; There’s also an integrity value.; This is used just to to validate that this wasn’t changed.; In transport, it’s part of the standard. It’s not particularly a threat model in this in this, in this bcid ecosystem, but it is technically part of the RCD standard.; So it is included.; And that’s it.; It’s otherwise a normal shaken passport.; And again, I want to highlight that it’s otherwise a normal shaken passport. So that if you were to send this call to a TSP that doesn’t support bcid, that’s never heard of bcid, it will be verified just like any other shaken passport.; They’ll ignore the RCD claim and the Rcdi claim.; And they’ll just verify it like normal, so it doesn’t require everyone to a top bcid to start working.; It it just works immediately and as more tsps add support for bcid.; Calls will get logos, obviously, but it doesn’t have any impact on on shaken. And of course it meets your regulatory requirement to implement shaken and on that note, if Bcid authentication is performed on a call, clearip will automatically not perform regular STI authentication. You can leave it en.; You don’t have to change anything with your STI configuration, it’ll just automatically skip it, because of course that would be redundant.; So that’s that’s really how it works. In ClearIP, it’s just two new pages and some new fields on this page.; We just looked at.; Of course, there’s also a bunch of new fields in the reporting systems you can generate reports group by onboarding agent, get Council calls, all the normal stuff that you do on the reporting page.; So that’s it, I guess.; Jim, do you have some more? Do you wanna go through or should we start going through questions?
Jim Dalton [0:35:54]: Yeah, I’ll tell you a couple of things. I want to go through, Alec, but I just want to say that looks, I mean that’s real easy for like 5 minutes.; You provision this CTA certificate one time and then you need to map those users to an enterprise ID and that’s kind of a one time thing.; And you’re as you’re done.; You know what I love about these?; Sit messages.; You know it. You’ll when you sign OSP agreement. You see, you’ll be audited.; This makes auditing.; So easy you got all the information right there and I think that’s really a that makes it easy. You know, in terms of being an OSP.; So let’s say let me go back.; I wanna share my screen and go over a couple more slides and.; Let’s see here y’all.; Let me know if.; You can see my screen.; You guys see my screen.; OK. Do you?; Let’s see, that’s not the right slide.; You see the slide show.
Alec Fenichel [0:37:0]: It’s the presenter view.
Jim Dalton [0:37:2]: Thank you.; OK, so I wanna address real quickly.; I’ve had this conversation multiple times.; Super important.; You know, you know Pete.; You know, enterprises are paying good money anywhere from, you know what we hear 3 to $0.10 per call.; That’s good money for telecom.; What does it cost?; What’s your cost good. Sold.; Well, I want to.; Kind of lay out for you. I don’t.; I can’t tell you what the numbers are ’cause it’s.; You know everybody.; That’s all non disclosure information, but I want to tell you the structure so you can get that information for yourself pretty quickly.; Workout what you think your cost of good sold will be and what you need to price branded calling at. So we talked about earlier, the TSP gets paid to terminate the terminate the call and display the brand.; How do you get that information? You need to sign the OSP agreement with CTIA. That’s where you get those details.; Bcid they have a charge.; They, you know, in terms of provisioning that data holding that data in the Bcid platform, they have real expenses, incur costs related to that.; So they do have a cost per brand per month. Again sign the OSP, the originating service provider agreement.; You’ll get those details.; You know our cost.; It starts at 0004, which is actually a little misleading.; You’re already paying 0002 for shaken, so your incremental cost to do bcid starts at 0002. So that’s that’s a piece not a big piece of the puzzle, but you want to count for everything. The vetting fee don’t have that information. You got to talk.; To your onboarding agent, because they’re the ones who are dealing with the vetting agent and paying that fee.; So get that information from your onboarding agent.; Insame for the onboarding fee. They got to make some money.; You know what do they charge?; What is their, you know, compensation?; Figure that out.; Join work with an onboarding and sign an NDA with with Mark and he can share that information with you and you can start to build your cost of goods sold for implant your business so next steps start off. You should tell your customers you’re going to offer brand.; Calling soon because if you don’t, they’re going to hear from somebody else.; I I it’s just it’s starting to catch hold. You want to?; You want to be early as an innovator for your customers, so you may as well tell them.; You know it’s available, and we’re gonna be offering it soon.; You need to sign the bcid agreements.; Contact, you know us. You know, if you’re working with Mark, Sean or Blake, you know they can give you the DocuSign link to get the process started.; There’s no cost to join the ecosystem and you’ll get that information you need for pricing with the TSP fee is what the branded calling a platform fee is, and I’ve got this link in here.; It’s a great document.; Branding calling best practices.; It’s not a very long read.; It’s only about 7 pages.; Explains everything. Easy to read. Quick, very logical.; You wanna take a look at that?; Make sure you understand that and get started right away by being your own first customer brand. The calls of your business.; You’re no SP but your OS, PS and enterprise and get signed up with. You know, Mark will sign you up.; You can start branding your call.; See what it looks like.; Understand the cost.; Understand the the reactions.; You know the experience.; Best way to get started?; Get a little experience under your belt and then you’re ready to.; Go to market.; So that’s what we recommend is the next steps. You know, I’ve got any questions obviously.; Come to us.; I want to stop there and open it up for Q&A for any questions anybody might have.; So Alec or Donald, do you see any questions?; Actually don’t see them from my screen that we need to address.
Alec Fenichel [0:40:32]: Yeah, there’s a number of questions.; There’s quite a few, so I’m gonna see if I can run through them and I’ll hand over any of them to Mark, John or Jim if I think that’s best.
Jim Dalton [0:40:43]: Great. Thank you, Alex.
Alec Fenichel [0:40:43]: So I’ll just start at the top over here.; So it’s the first question, just a confirmation from brand logo is not delivered by the terminating service provider, no charges apply.; Only when the brand logo is displayed in the call party’s phone will there will be charged, yes and no.; So the bcid authentication price that Jim showed from a ClearIP side does still apply, although as Jim mentioned it is marginally more than the STI authentication price.; Obviously, the price of vetting that logo and putting it in the BCA platform is independent of any call volume.; But the per call price charged by the TSP.; Is not applied if that logo is not displayed.; So no, the pricing is isn’t is very much intended to be you know the bulk of the cost comes from that display not from you know the back end provisioning side.; Let’s see another question that we’ve got here.; Customer who wants or called branded.; Would they be required to work directly with the vetting agent?; So the customers don’t really work with vetting agents. They would work with the onboarding agent, the vetting agents behind the scenes that the onboarding agent works with.; But you know, with marks with, with solution with NUM Hub you can work directly.; The enterprise can work directly with NUM Hub or the OSP can kind of resell be that that white label in the middle.; It’s really up to the OSP what they want to do, so we’ve got a question if there if we have this set up is that there’s no cnm dips, it becomes unnecessary. Exactly this replaces.; For CNN and instead of as a TSP, instead of you doing a CNM dip and paying to get the caller display name, you will actually get paid.; By the Bcid platform, which then you know, of course, gets paid by the the enterprise to display that name.; So it’s a, it’s a great model.; Not only do you reduce your cost, you actually turn what’s currently an expense into a revenue opportunity ASP.; IR another question about CNM.; Yes, it lowers your cost for cm.; Is it possible for TSP not to be part of the?; He said.; Ecosystems still support shaken, so I tried to touch on that a little bit before.; Yes, absolutely. The bcid create or passports created with the BCID certificates are would just appear as a regular old shaken passport and a regular shaken certificates to anyone who doesn’t support bcid.; It won’t have any impact on that.; Will eliminate circumstances.; Religion amount calls are labeled as spam.; Certainly it is probably a pretty important factor into the TS PS algorithms that they use to determine whether a call is is spam.; You know fundamentally TS PS can mark calls as spam based on reasonable analytics, whatever that is.; It’s not a hard requirement.; At ABC, ID call wouldn’t be marked as spam, but obviously a call that’s been gone through the spying and they can be certain has gone through the vetting. I would think they’d be much less likely to mark a spam.; See how does a customer get their certificate revoked?; Yeah. So there’s there’s kind of two things.; Fundamentally, this is a A you can think of like a subset of shaken. You got Superset, maybe in a way it’s it’s additional rules on top of shaken.; So you have your shaken certificate.; Your bcid certificate is a shaken certificate. If you violate the rules of the GA or PA.; That certificate will be revoked by the GA or pennsynva if you get removed from the rmdb database, you know you do anything wrong.; From that perspective, your certificate will be revoked.; But then if you misbehave as an OSP and violate the bcid rules, you’ll get removed from the Bcid ecosystem.; So it’s kind of a subset on top of the ignore existing shaken ecosystem.; Every service provider, every OSP at least that is a member of the Bcid ecosystem, inherently must also.; Be a member of the general shaken ecosystem.; It’s it is a subset.; What if the OSP is using A10 from at least third party?; So the vetting.; So it’s kind of like normal shaken, right?; There’s no requirement that the call use a calling number that the OSP is assigned from.; You know, a lyric perspective.; So the vetting process can can be applied.; OS PS can originate the call.; It doesn’t matter if you are the OSP in the lure for that.; Calling number or not?; There’s no relation.; Is this support out of band? So out of band does not with with ClearIP we do not currently support out of band for bcid we expect that to be coming out by before the end of the year that will be released for those who don’t know there.; A new out of band standard that is going to be voted on or the the voting is concluded on December 2nd.; So we’re a little bit hesitant to do too much right now without a band with those upcoming changes.; So we expect that to happen.; Shortly after that December 2nd meeting.; Is there maximum number of phone numbers that can be asserted with with a brand?; I’m not aware of any maximum John is. Is there a maximum?
John Marinho [0:45:37]: No, there is not. As long as the numbers are within the North American numbering plan, they can use as many numbers as they like.; We just have to be able to put them through vetting.
Alec Fenichel [0:45:48]: OK.; Thank you.; Product demo for Searchflighters set themselves up for testing vetting. So just like normal ClearIP process.; When you wanna get started, do we have a trial period we can help you go through setting up in your staging environment. Generally, the way we recommend doing it is doing all your testing with regular old shaken, not with bcid. All of the integration with your switch with.; Your Sbcs with your handsets, all of that is the same whether it’s bcid or regular old shaken, right.; Fundamentally, there there’s not anything different in the signalling.; That’s the beauty of this design. So go through all the normal testing testing processes with with regular shaken.; Terms of pricing content and B process will occur.; The STI authentication charge and obesity authentication charge no. Any given call will at most get one of those two charges.; Obviously if it’s an inbound call or or there’s no authentication performed of any kind, it’ll get neither. But ClearIP will automatically not perform bcid authentication.; I’m sorry STI authentication and therefore not charge you for STI authentication if Bcid authentication is performed, there’s nothing you need to configure for that to happen.; Question. Is the icon Limited to BMP?; Currently yes, it is limited to BMP.; That was discussed in the past. It may be discussed in the future once you join the ecosystem. CTA has regular calls with all the ecosystem partners where we discuss things like this right now that the decision has been made to keep it at one thing, BMP for broad.; Compatibility obviously, as the OSP, you don’t know what the handset is when you place that call. So you you, you know, use some exotic format, maybe have some benefits on on some cases, but in other cases it may result in the logo not being.; Displayed so right now that’s that’s still kinda constantly being evaluated, but it’s currently limited to 256 by 256 bit Bmps.; Since the Bcid signature being sent to the service provider, how does the attestation trace since it will not be linked to 3rd shaken certificate? So your bcid certificate is is fundamentally a shaken certificate.; It is issued by a STICACTIA is the STICA that is approved in the shake and ecosystem.; That certificate has your.; Service provider code in it.; It is specific to you and so it’s just like regular old shaken tracebacks.; Everything works identical to regular old shaken.; See.; Assuming that this feature Nex OSS is simple software upgrade, yes, if the feature is not you don’t see it in the menu bar of your version of nexoss. You’re gonna need a software upgrade. If you haven’t been upgraded in the past, probably 3, maybe six months, you you.; You’ll need an upgrade.; Do the call customers calls with a shaken certificate also get an A so any call at least for ClearIP. Any call will inherently get an A at the station when a bcid certificate is used. You don’t even configure the attestation level.; By just due to the requirements that Bcid has, you’ve inherently met all the requirements for a level attestation.; So any calls signed with the BCID certificate that ClearIP or NEX OSS signs will have a level at station will have a name claim. That name claim can be an empty string.; That it will be present and there may be an optional logo and an optional call reason.; Let’s see.; Bcd sent for emergency calls.; I don’t know how, how? Why would? If anyone would do that?; I mean, I suppose they could.; I’m not aware of any requirements that would prevent that.; But that’s not something I’ve heard discussed much.; Will it override the CNM or CID be used in the PA from so?; When ClearIP is performing verification, when you’re at TSP ClearIP.; Will return AP asserted identity header just like it does when code IP does a cname lookup now. So you from.; A integration perspective.; It’ll be identical if you’ve done integration testing.; Got CNN working through Clearip Bcid display name will work automatically.; There’s no difference at all.; It will just like with authentication. Of course you’re not going to get charged for acnnm.; Look up if the name comes from bcid, it’ll automatically skip CNM lookups even if you’ve got it turned on for those calls because it knows it’s got a better name.; And it’ll get returned in the header as a display name, just like it does for CNAM today to down.; Let’s see.; Jose, I see a question here about pricing. The ClearIP authentication pricing starts at 0.0004444.; And again, that is kind of a little bit misleading because the STI authentication pricing 0002 will no longer apply.; So that’s it’s just that difference of 0002 for those calls.; Are all the mobile operators at TSP right now the only TSP that is live in in production is T-Mobile, but as as was discussed earlier, the hope is that more tsps will be coming soon and CTA is currently working on the TSP agreements to allow all of.; You to register as TS PS and display certainly the name right even on a pots line you can display the name and then of course if your handsets to support it soft phones, things like that, the logo and or call reason.; I believe I through all the questions.; I’m not sure if you have anything to add, Jim or John or Mark.
Jim Dalton [0:51:15]: Yeah, I do have a question. You know, I get this question a lot and maybe John, you can address this a lot of folks want to be ATSP and you know they’re can you kind of share with them what should they, what should their expectations be for when?; You know, the ability to be ATS PS opened up beyond just the three big wireless carriers.; You know, for the folks on this call when when can they sign ATSP agreement?
John Marinho [0:51:40]: So we’re working on those agreements as we speak.; And they can start the process as soon as they’d like to ’cause we can begin working with them in parallel.; We have a set of requirements that we can share in terms of what are the requirements on ATSP. We’re happy to make that available.; And again, our legal folks are working on that TSP template, especially for your particular customer base because we’d like to bring on folks that are not traditional wireless carriers, right.; This platform is technology neutral.; It’s technology agnostic.; It’s standard stir shaken, as Alec described, and it’ll work on any system that supports the ability to display, and that could be wireline, wireless, all of the above cell phones, you name it. As long as you have the ability to integrate with the platform that you all descri.; Again, you can start signing up tomorrow to be ATSP and OSP because.; As long as folks are prepared to meet the requirements.; And play by the rules that we’ve defined.; For pcid, then, they’re welcome to join the ecosystem.
Jim Dalton [0:52:52]: OK.; Well, John, that sounds great. I guess we’ll wait till the TSP agreement is finalized.; And I I tell you, perhaps you could join us on another webinar.; We’d like to educate everybody.; What those TSP requirements are explain you know how how it works and what they can expect, so that’s exciting.; And you know, this really is it levels, the playing field makes this available for every service provider and that that’s one thing gets me really excited about it. So it’s.; You know, this is just a commercial agreement, no technology.; It’s very innovative and it’s exciting.; So anyway, thank you for sharing that with us.; So Donald, I don’t know if we have anything else, but I just want to thank John and Mark, both of you guys taking time.; I know you all are really busy sharing with us.; You know, you know your understanding, your expertise for our customers and anyone else that’s showing this call.; So we really appreciate it and Alec, great job on the questions.; So thanks guys.; Great to have a webinar with three excellent guest speakers. Y’all make it easy.; Thank you.
Mark Bilton-Smith [0:53:54]: Thank you, Jim.
John Marinho [0:53:55]: Thank you.
Alec Fenichel [0:53:57]: Thank you.
Jim Dalton [0:53:57]: Alright, great. Thanks.

BCID^™ is a service mark of CTIA — The Wireless Association.

About TransNexus

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