Restoring Trust in Global Voice: The Critical Role of the Vetting Agent in Open Verifiable Calling

The following article was originally published in partnership with GSMA.

‍

Voice remains one of the most universal and powerful channels of communication in the world, connecting businesses to customers, healthcare providers to patients, governments to citizens, and families to one another. Yet despite its reach and importance, trust in voice communications has eroded dramatically. Consumers avoid answering calls, enterprises struggle to reach legitimate contacts, and fraud continues to exploit weaknesses in how identity is presented and verified across the global phone network.

Fraud and impersonation now represent one of the most significant threats to trust in global communications. The GSMA has warned that scams cost consumers and businesses hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year [1], with losses continuing to grow in scale and sophistication. This is more than criminal activity; it is a systemic trust failure. Today’s phone network offers no reliable way for a legitimate caller to establish who they are, nor for recipients to confidently rely on that identity.

It is within this context that the GSMA Foundry’s Open Verifiable Calling (OVC) initiative represents a critical and timely advancement. OVC is not simply another attempt to improve caller ID. It is a collaborative, standards-driven effort to embed verifiable identity and cryptographic proof directly into voice calls, enabling trust to be established based on evidence rather than assumption.

‍

Why Identity Is The Foundation of Trust

Trust in communications begins with identity. If we cannot answer the fundamental question, “Who is calling?”, then every downstream decision becomes uncertain forcing consumers, enterprises, and networks to rely on best-effort signals rather than proof.

Historically, trust in voice communications was tied to the phone number itself, reinforced by network-level assumptions about how calls were provisioned and delivered. Traditional Caller ID provided additional context about an incoming call, but it was never designed to prove who was actually behind it. As spoofing and impersonation scaled, those signals were easily exploited, exposing the limits of Caller ID as a foundation for trust.

Legacy trust assumptions were not built for the scale, speed, and cross-network complexity of modern communications. Calls now traverse multiple providers, networks, and jurisdictions in seconds, yet identity remains unverifiable. OVC addresses this challenge by treating identity as foundational infrastructure. Identity must be verifiable, portable, and grounded in open standards if trust is to scale across networks and borders.

‍

Introducing Open Verifiable Calling

Open Verifiable Calling is a GSMA Foundry initiative demonstrating how established, open technologies can be combined to rebuild trust in voice calls. It defines a framework in which identity claims — who is calling, what organization they represent, and which phone numbers they are entitled to use — are accompanied by verifiable credentials that can be cryptographically checked by participating parties.

At its core, OVC brings together open standards, defined vetting requirements, cryptographic credentials, and native presentation across devices and networks, enabling verified identity information to be displayed directly on the receiving device without requiring consumers to install additional applications.

Unlike closed or purely bilateral trust models, OVC is designed for interoperability without requiring participants to cede control to a single centralized authority. While establishing this level of trust is not simple, the project demonstrates that it is achievable through open standards and clearly defined roles. Identity assertions are supported by evidence rather than opaque reputation scores, enabling networks, service providers, and ultimately recipients to make informed trust decisions that can be shared and extended across ecosystems.

‍

The Vetting Agent: Establishing Identity at the Source

At the heart of the OVC framework is a set of clearly defined ecosystem roles. Among them, the Vetting Agent plays a uniquely critical function.

The Vetting Agent establishes trust at the beginning of the identity lifecycle. It verifies the legal identity of organizations, confirms entitlement to phone numbers and related attributes, and issues cryptographically signed credentials attesting to those verified claims. These credentials are verified against transparent, well-defined vetting standards, without reliance on centralized databases or bilateral trust relationships. Without consistent vetting standards, credentials risk becoming another form of “trust me” rather than a durable foundation for interoperability.

This reflects a principle long recognized in regulated industries: trust must be anchored at the source. Without rigorous, standardized vetting at onboarding, downstream verification cannot compensate for weak or ambiguous identity claims. In a global voice ecosystem, the Vetting Agent provides assurance that identity assertions are rooted in verified truth.

Numeracle’s participation in OVC brings this principle into practice. Since our founding, we have focused on building authoritative identity frameworks for communications, grounded in rigor, transparency, and accountability. That experience helps ensure the Vetting Agent role within OVC is implemented with the consistency required to support trust at global scale.

‍

Why the Vetting Agent Role Is Essential

The Vetting Agent serves as the trust anchor of the OVC ecosystem.

First, it establishes a reliable source of truth. Vetting ensures through a well-defined set of criteria that organizations are who they claim to be and that they are entitled to use the phone numbers and identity attributes they present.

Second, it enables independent verification at scale. Because credentials are cryptographically signed and based on open standards, participants in the ecosystem can validate identity assertions in a consistent and interoperable way, without exclusive reliance on a single proprietary system.

Third, it supports global interoperability. Calls routinely cross borders and networks, yet identity credentials issued through a trusted Vetting Agent remain verifiable regardless of geography.

Finally, the Vetting Agent introduces accountability. Vetting creates auditable chains of responsibility, enabling regulators and ecosystem participants to move beyond best-effort compliance toward demonstrable, evidence-based assurance. OVC marks a fundamental shift by embedding proof directly into the call lifecycle, making trust verifiable rather than merely asserted.

‍

From Best-Effort to Provable Trust

One of the most important shifts introduced by OVC is the move from probabilistic trust models to provable ones.

Today’s voice networks rely on heuristics, reputation signals, and partial authentication mechanisms. While useful, these approaches cannot definitively establish identity and are routinely exploited by bad actors. OVC augments existing tools with cryptographic proof, making identity far harder to alter, hijack, or misrepresent.

Combined with clearly defined roles like the Vetting Agent, this approach enables consumers to regain confidence in voice communications, allows operators to promote legitimate traffic, and supports regulatory obligations through evidence rather than inference.

‍

Vision: A World Where Every Call Carries Trust

The Vetting Agent is more than a role. It is a trust anchor in a decentralized, interoperable system, reflecting the reality that trust in communications must be established deliberately, not inferred. Identity must be verifiable, portable, and grounded in evidence rather than assumptions.

OVC advances a new trust model by combining three essential elements: a strong identity framework that ties organizations to the phone numbers and brand attributes they are entitled to use; cryptographic proof mechanisms that protect identity from tampering or misuse; and consistent presentation of verified identity by networks and devices. This framework reflects principles long applied in mature identity and vetting programs, ensuring that identity and rights are established upstream so trust can flow through the entire call lifecycle.

This vision is not just a concept, it’s a reality. At MWC Barcelona 2026, Open Verifiable Calling (OVC) will be showcased through a live demonstration at the GSMA Mobile Identity Summit, offering a tangible view of how verifiable identity, open standards, and clearly defined roles work together across networks and borders.

Numeracle was founded on the belief that trust in communications cannot exist without verifiable identity. From the beginning, our mission has been to stop fraud at its source by establishing who is behind a communication before it ever reaches a consumer. With deep experience and pioneering work in identity vetting across the global communications ecosystem, we are proud to contribute that foundation to OVC. Together with the GSMA and industry partners worldwide, we are working toward a future where every call carries trust, every identity is provable, and confidence in communications can be restored at scale.

[1] Source: www.gsma.com/scams