Trusted, Where Voice Intersects with Identity
Looking back at 2025, one thing stands out to me: trust has quietly become the bottleneck in modern communication. We have made real progress in digital identity and security on the web, yet voice still relies on assumptions that belong to another era.
At the same time, AI and modern, globally interconnected telecom networks have dramatically lowered the barrier to abuse, making impersonation faster, cheaper, and harder to detect.
That gap is exactly why Trusted exists. Trusted is a partnership between banking executives and voice and identity experts at Simptel. It was formed around a problem the industry has avoided for too long: voice still lacks a reliable identity layer.
This partnership reflects Simptel’s long-term vision of connecting the world through simple communication. But simplicity only works when trust is built into the system. Without it, communication does not scale. It erodes.
Caller ID spoofing shows the consequences clearly. Europol has repeatedly identified spoofing as a key enabler of phone-based fraud and abuse. In its position paper on Caller ID spoofing, Europol explains how easily phone numbers can be manipulated and how this weakness is exploited across borders at scale.¹ Today, spoofing plays a role in around 64 percent of fraud cases involving calls and messages, causing hundreds of millions in losses every year.
This is not a tooling issue. It is structural. Caller ID was never designed to be an identity signal, yet we continue to treat it as one. With AI-generated voice, automated call flows, and modern telecom APIs, impersonation has become trivial. Spoofing a phone number now takes only a few minutes, requires little effort, and can be executed globally.
In the Netherlands, this reality has been normalized. Institutions may call anonymously, while customers are expected to prove who they are. From an identity and security perspective, trust is upside down. The risk is shifted onto individuals instead of being enforced by infrastructure.
This is where Trusted Voice comes in.
Trusted Voice brings identity and security to the point where they actually matter: the signaling layer. Instead of reacting after fraud has occurred, it enables verifiable caller identity at call setup, addressing spoofing at its root and making large-scale impersonation structurally unsustainable.
Learn more about Trusted Voice at https://www.trustedvoice.eu.
References
¹ Europol, Position Paper on Caller ID Spoofing
https://www.europol.europa.eu/publications-events/publications/position-paper-caller-id-spoofing
