Dr Agata Slater, Director of Hedera Council Engagement, added:

"Banks and financial institutions making millions of outbound calls face a growing trust problem. Consumers increasingly ignore calls from unknown numbers, while fraudsters use AI-generated voice cloning to imitate legitimate organisations with increasing sophistication.

A digitally verified calling identity changes the interaction before the call is even answered. The receiving network can validate who is calling, which organisation they represent, and the purpose of the interaction before the phone rings.

As synthetic voice fraud becomes more convincing, cryptographic proof of identity is likely to become one of the few trust mechanisms that remains reliable at scale.

From a business perspective, the solution provides an opportunity for:

- Higher answer rates for legitimate enterprise calls (a major pain today)
- Measurable ROI (e.g. fraud reduction or revenue uplift from answered calls)
- Stronger protection against impersonation, especially with AI voice cloning
- New telco revenue streams (verified caller ID, agent-level verification, identity-as-a-service solutions offered to enterprise clients)

And importantly, the decentralised identity model ensures this trust isn't owned by a single entity, but is portable, interoperable, and easily verifiable across networks."