How Twilio solutions help businesses forget to worry about verification challenges

How Twilio solutions help businesses forget to worry about verification challenges

Identity verification is becoming an increasingly crucial step across digital business communications. Beyond account registration, user login, and fraud protection, user verification is a growing imperative for businesses to accurately identify and confirm authenticity of provided information and prevent identity theft, account takeover, or fraudulent activities. But while all of this is important, it can also be a lot for one business to worry about.

What if there were solutions that could take the pressure off – so you could focus on adding value elsewhere?

With the Twilio Lookup and Verify APIs, product leaders and fraud leaders can relax knowing that Twilio has things covered. From enhanced security with Fraud Guard, to ongoing route optimization for faster user verification, Twilio helps your business forget to worry about the threats and stay firmly focused on productivity. Read on to discover the different ways Verify and Lookup are designed to help your business.

Verify: A specialized solution for adding user verification to your application

The Verify API is a specialized one-time passcode (OTP) solution that harnesses the power of Twilio's Programmable Messaging API with added channels, capabilities, and features specifically targeting user authentication. Verify manages the ever-growing complexity and compliance requirements, so you don't have to maintain an in-house OTP solution and can focus on your business logic.

Fraud Guard

Prevent SMS pumping and save money.

Verify Fraud Guard protection is an industry leading solution to block SMS traffic pumping. Included with the price of Verify, Fraud Guard will automatically block suspicious traffic and only allow legitimate SMS OTP traffic in your application. With three Fraud Guard protection modes, the feature can be balanced to fit your risk tolerance. Customers have saved over 55.8 million dollars with Verify Fraud Guard.

Managed compliance

Stay compliant in an ever-changing regulatory environment without constant vigilance.

Avoid the complexities of ever-changing carrier and government registration requirements with managed solutions for things like A2P 10DLC. Verify's managed compliance will help minimize overhead, maximize delivery, and avoid potential fines. Stay insulated from the near-constant changing Know Your Customer (KYC) and sender requirements.

The Verify API also provides pre-approved OTP templates to stay compliant with local SMS requirements and avoid carrier filtering.

Ongoing routing optimization

Verify more users, faster – and without risk of interruption.

Verify provides high delivery and conversion rates with a dedicated team to monitor and improve OTP delivery performance. Verify uses premium telephony routes on Twilio's Super Network to prioritize deliverability and speed. You benefit from our experience managing a dedicated service for hundreds of customers including fallback options. For example, if a delivery route in Western Europe is temporarily degraded, Verify has built-in redundancy to a secondary global network for failover and delivery optimization.

Managed number pool

Decrease your time to market – globally ready on Day 1

Verify includes a sender phone number pool, including short codes, long codes, toll free, and global alpha-sender IDs (pre-registration required for alpha sender IDs in certain countries outside of NAMER). Local numbers are used where available to enhance global delivery. This means you have less setup to think about, can save money on phone numbers, and can get up and running globally faster.

Verify managed senders also help you future proof your implementation for simple global expansion or unexpected peaks in traffic.

If you want to use your own sender IDs, Verify supports that too.

Turnkey API

Focus on your business logic instead of verification nuances.

Verify provides a stateless API for handling OTP generation and checking (with the option to still bring-your-own code!). Along with providing sender IDs, this means less code for you to manage and maintain.

Send millions of OTPs a day out of the box, with the support to scale higher if needed, including best in class support for spiky traffic. In addition, our security team conducts regular penetration testing and phone number checks to ensure data integrity.

Multi-channel and passwordless delivery

Switch OTP delivery channels seamlessly.

Verify includes multi-channel support for SMS, WhatsApp, SNA, voice, email, push, and TOTP. Optimize for conversions across channels with considerations for global, use case-specific, and risk-balanced options.

Verify is also future ready: our team is constantly investing in bringing new channels and features to the solution.

Insights and Reporting

See actionable insights and conversion rates by channel and country.

Verify dashboards provide conversion and success rates per region and channel, and Verify SMS Fraud Insights provides regional trends and conversions to optimize against fraud and illustrates the impact fraud could have had without Fraud Guard protections.

Localization and translations

Delight global customers with translated templates in dozens of languages.

Improve user experience with templatized OTP message translations in over 40 languages, including real spoken translations for voice calling. Integrate translations into any of our pre-approved templates.

Global technical support

Lean on Twilio's global support team if you need us.

Whether you have a question or something goes wrong, Twilio will own the fix. Our global support team has hundreds of agents available for live, follow-the-sun support.

Lookup: Mobile Identity Intelligence for trusted communications

The Twilio Lookup API allows businesses to gain valuable insights on identity signals from phone numbers to optimize the customer experience and lower fraud vulnerability.

Lookup can be applied most effectively to a few critical use cases: confirming identity details, determining communication channel routing, and assessing identity risk. When using the full set of products, businesses can offer a seamless experience for user registration, login, contact information changes, and other high-risk interactions.

1. Phone Number Identity

For businesses, the benefit of leveraging phone number identity lies in establishing a robust layer of security while ensuring a seamless user experience. In scenarios where identity validation is crucial—such as account registration, user login, and fraud protection—ensuring accurate user identity becomes crucial.

One common issue businesses encounter is the challenge of verifying user identities accurately during account creation or login. This challenge often arises when businesses need to confirm the authenticity of provided information and prevent identity theft, account takeover, or fraudulent activities.

To tackle this issue effectively, Lookup Identity Match confirms phone number ownership during account creation, enabling subsequent possession factor checks. Cross-referencing user provided data against authoritative sources helps in preventing identity theft, while also ensuring the user has provided accurate information.

In addition to Identity Match, Twilio’s Lookup API also offers Line Type Intelligence, SIM Swap, and Call Forwarding, packages. When used together, these queries enable businesses to identify risks associated with the phone number, detect SIM changes, and uncover call forwarding, thereby protecting their systems from a wide variety of common fraud and identity theft schemes.

A real-world example showcasing the effectiveness of Lookup Identity Match comes from Tradier, where implementing this solution not only helped catch signals of fraud but also streamlined their sign-up flow. The business reduced identity validation time by 90%, demonstrating a significant impact on operational efficiency.

1. Phone Number Routing

Understanding phone number routing is critical for businesses in optimizing methods of communication and maintaining efficient user interaction. For example, if reaching out via Voice or SMS is possible and, whether the contact is feasible in real-time. Businesses that engage in marketing activities can find this extremely useful.

Line Type Intelligence helps identify whether a phone number is a mobile, landline, or VoIP, enabling businesses to control platform access based on approved number types. This insight assists in restricting sign-ups from certain number categories, ensuring compliance with business protocols and optimizing communication channels.

Line Status functionality ensures that a phone number is active and connected to the network before initiating any communication attempt. This information is particularly valuable for companies engaged in marketing promotions where contacting users incurs a significant cost.

One common challenge that organizations that use SMS services face is the aging of their phone number databases. Twilio's analysis found that a sizable percentage (13.7%) of submitted numbers did not support SMS. By ensuring that communication attempts are directed at compatible phones, Twilio's Line Type Intelligence may drastically decrease SMS expenses and streamline SMS campaigns.

1. Phone Number Risk Assessment

Purpose: Understanding the risk signals associated with a phone number is critical for organizations in protecting themselves from fraud and ensuring regulatory compliance. Scenarios emerge frequently in which firms must assess the risk of potential fraud or verify compliance in order to prevent major fines and other similar consequences.

Preventing SMS Pumping Fraud and ensuring compliance with rules such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) are two essential scenarios. SMS Pumping Risk Score aids businesses in evaluating the risk associated with SMS-related fraud, particularly combating artificially inflated traffic. While Twilio offers Verify Fraud Guard and SMS Pumping Protection for similar fraud prevention, Lookup's SMS Pumping Risk Score offers added flexibility for businesses requiring more control or using multiple suppliers for OTP delivery.

Furthermore, for businesses engaged in SMS marketing, Lookup Reassigned Number ensures the ongoing validity of marketing consent by checking if the phone number still belongs to the user who provided consent. Contacting the wrong end-user, even unintentionally, could lead to substantial fines of up to $1,500 per message.

Forget to worry about verification challenges with Twilio Verify and Lookup

Product and fraud leaders have less to worry about when leveraging Twilio’s cutting-edge authentication and identity solutions.

By focusing on verifying user-provided data with Verify and Lookup, businesses can significantly reduce vulnerability to fraud while enhancing user experience. Streamlined onboarding minimizes friction, potentially leading to higher customer engagement and increased revenue. And while all of this works seamlessly in the background, leaders can focus on elevating the business in areas that matter the most.