Trusted Caller ID with digital wallet and VCs improves call center authentication

Decentralized digital IDs shared from a digital wallet on a smartphone can significantly speed up identity verification by call centers, making interactions easier for consumers while slashing costs for businesses, the results of a proof of concept pilot of a new Trusted Caller ID process.

Dock Labs CEO Nick Lambert was joined by GSMA Identity and Data Director Helene Vigue and Telefónica Tech Product Director Glyn Povah to share the Trusted Caller ID PoC results. TMT ID also participated in the proof of concept.

The partners set out the challenge of delivering trust to call center interactions in a timely way without inviting data privacy and security risks and their approach of using decentralized digital ID in a previous online presentation.

The proof of concept they ran combined the assets of mobile operators like Telefónica, network APIs and Dock Labs’ Truvera decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials’ technology to address that challenge.

Povah reviewed how pre-identity checks in the form of Caller IDs sent from the SIM in the user’s device over the network to the call center (or any other phone number) can be spoofed, breaking trust in who is on the line, for instance, asking to carry out account recovery. If it is a bad actor who is falsely identified as the real caller, the recovery process is an account takeover (ATO) attack.

Faster caller authentication also reduces businesses’ operational costs.

In the PoC, Dock’s technology is used to reduce how much data consumers must hand over to complete authentication.

Only 4 percent of the $1 trillion lost in scams in 2024 was recovered, Vigue says, and trust is similarly difficult to recover when lost.

The prevalence of scam phone calls also prompted the U.S. FCC to propose stronger KYC requirements for voice service providers just weeks ago.

Concept proved

The Trusted Caller ID PoC was presented at MWC 2026 earlier this year, in part to encourage industry discussion, collaboration and innovation to fight back against scams.

As in the presentation where they introduced the PoC, the partners showed a demonstration of the process, with a confirmation in the Truvera digital wallet passing a cryptographic proof of account ownership to the call center to complete identity verification within seconds.

This process cut authentication times significantly for 80 percent of calls in the PoC, and two-thirds felt it was more secure. As a result, 100 percent of participants said they would use the authentication method again, validating the concept.

In some cases, authentication with decentralized digital ID instead of knowledge-based authentication (KBA) cut times from over three minutes to less than one.

While demand was high, scale will require embedded digital wallet integration in the future. The partners also plan to work on validating the cost and revenue models so they can monetize the capability.

Meanwhile, the digital wallet market remains immature and “quite complex,” Povah says, which could be a barrier to adoption at scale.

The process uses a DIDComm message instead of the presentation of a signed credential from the user, Lambert explains, because it delivered the same result with one less click.

To scale the system, the Truvera wallet could be embedded within the carrier’s app, which Lambert calls “our best guess right now as to how this would be packaged.”

The completed PoC leaves the question like whether mobile carriers want to act as VC issuers and how wallet addresses will be assigned.

A similar-looking solution was recently launched by Barclays, Lambert says, though “under the hood they operate quite differently.”

The digital wallet approach like that taken by Dock Labs and its partners is differentiated in part by its extensibility, according to Lambert. Capabilities like sharing additional identity data for customer loyalty or age verification use cases and privacy-preserving biometric checks could dramatically expand the use of phone-based decentralized digital identity to restore trust to interactions, whether through the voice channel or online.

Article Topics

call centers  |  caller authentication  |  decentralized ID  |  digital wallets  |  Dock  |  identity verification  |  Telefónica Tech