In 2020, COVID-19 accelerated digital transformations that were expected to take several years. This article explores three ways that consumer trust in communications will evolve in 2021: mobile numbers will become your ID, the notion of privacy will get even more fluid and businesses can expect to face an identity crisis.

Identity theft is at an all-time high and in 2019 alone, fraud losses grew 15% to $16.9 billion. As the most used personal identifier for consumer account management, the mobile phone number is increasingly becoming an important factor to help organizations mitigate fraud and assess risk. This is especially true when initiating financial transactions where businesses are increasingly relying on mobile devices for second-factor authentication access. In addition, 833,000 porting and pooling transactions are made each day in the U.S. alone, which makes number porting data another key tool being utilized to authenticate the identity of consumers.

Most forms of communications fraud have one thing in common: They exploit trust. Take callerID, for instance. History has shown that when callerID information is compromised, communications spam, scams and spoofing soars. Learn more about how the industry is working together to effectively mitigate fraud across voice calls , text messages and chatbot conversations.