Rebekah Johnson – Building a Business Identity Ecosystem at Numeracle

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to the Future of Identity, a show that highlights the world’s most innovative digital identity ecosystems and the people behind them. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we are the first identity acceptance network, helping businesses verify their users 10 times faster through partnerships, dozens of digital ID wallets. Today, I spoke to Rebekah Johnson, founder and CEO of Numeracle, about the business identity ecosystem that she’s building to prevent spam and fraud over telecommunications. We dive into her journey, starting Numeracle in 2016 to tackle robocalling, and her journey to today as an identity issuer in the telco ecosystem using the STIR and SHAKEN protocols, which have now rolled out to subscribers of T-Mobile. I thought one of the more interesting parts of this conversation was covering the chicken and egg problem she faced in the early days and how she made money before any of these carriers rolled these protocols out into production.

Riley Hughes: We likened the business identity ecosystem to the consumer identity ecosystem and how companies should react when they know some new identity standard is coming, but it’s not here yet, like, for example, with eIDAS 2.0. And we finished off talking about modern AI and how to keep trust in communications when sometimes robocalling can be good, like when an AI agent is making a call on your behalf. And now to my conversation with Rebekah. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and I’m here with Rebekah Johnson, founder and CEO of Numeracle.

Rebekah Johnson: Hi, I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I’m really excited to have you. I’m excited to talk. We’ve obviously connected a few times at some of the conferences in the identity space over the years. I wanted to start by framing the conversation. Our podcast, we typically talk about digital ID ecosystems, and I view what you’re building at Numeracle as a reusable business ID ecosystem focused on solving problems in a specific area. But is that the right framing, or how would you describe what you’re building?

Rebekah Johnson: That’s a great story. You’re doing better than most people.

Riley Hughes: So I wondered if we could just start off by maybe if you could share your story and a little bit about what Numeracle does and what problem you’re solving, and then we can go from there.

Rebekah Johnson: Happy to do that. I honestly never knew I would be launching a company and going down that startup path. It just fell into my lap. I worked at West Corporation. My background is engineering, so I was a code slinger. Visual Basic 6.0 is where I got my start and love data. I love writing code, building technologies. And in my pathway at West Corporation, we were delivering communications for hospitals, doctors, banks, pharmacies, like everywhere. And I got introduced to the concept of identity in my 20s, where I was looking at the data going, wait a minute, I see this person is in this database. This person’s over at this pharmacy. Like I could literally see all the businesses that they were interacting with. And one of our challenges was when someone changed their phone number or they changed their address. And that’s when I got to the concept of why can’t I, as a consumer, just have my identity, and then once I update it once, then it gets pushed out.

Rebekah Johnson: And the real story is I would lose my credit cards all the time when I was in my 20s, and I would wait for someone to call and say, We need to collect money. I was like, Oh yeah, I gotta update that. You know, that was my first entry into identity. I tried to launch it at the company. I was told, Be quiet, there’s no such thing. So fast forward, I believed in consumer identity, but that just wasn’t going to be my path in life. So I thought, you know what, the flip side of this is business identity, because I really believe that if I had a consumer identity with a business identity, perhaps it’s just a leap for the two to be able to gather access to data and move it back and forth and not have to store it. So I’ve just been looking and waiting for that opportunity for business identity. And lo and behold, in 2016, it presented itself. And the way it presented itself was I participated on the FCC’s robocall Strike Force.

Rebekah Johnson: Little side note, I wanted to be a lawyer, had every intention of going to law school, but when I graduated with a degree in programming, the jobs were just too abundant in 2000. So didn’t pursue that, but my brain actually really operates in a legal regulatory space, and my patents are usually around that. So I was on the Strike Force, and here we are making decisions. The FCC needed to address consumer fraud that was happening over the voice channel. The phone calls were coming through, people were pretending to be a nephew, grandma thinks it’s her grandson, or somebody thinks it’s their nephew, and they give all this money to get them out of jail, right? So much fraud is being committed on this channel, so the FCC had to respond to this. And they asked the carriers to do something, because I think it’s very natural to go, fraud’s committed on the communication channel, we need to go to the communication providers to solve it. While I was sitting there, decisions were going to be made about identifying the call as fraud or spam and presenting that to the consumer.

Rebekah Johnson: And I thought this was just the worst idea because there was no exchange of identity. And I kept raising my hand saying, if you’re going to try to make a decision about identity and never collect identifying information, you’re going to get it wrong, and it’s actually going to cause far more harm to consumers than the problem that you’re trying to solve. Told, be quiet, don’t worry about it, administration is changing, we just got to publish a report. So we did it. So first quarter of 2017, I actually received a call from one of the carriers, the regulatory policy individual. And he said, everything you’ve predicted was going to happen. We’re getting the identity wrong, and asked, what do we do? So literally, sometimes if you’re starting a company, it can actually come through a phone call. And I believed in it so much, and I realized I was the only person literally in the world that saw this problem coming and actually had an idea of how to solve it. And so. when I moved forward with it, I had quarterly meetings with each of the carrier representatives, the FCC, FTC, CFPB.

Rebekah Johnson: Oddly enough, NSA dropped in on some of my meetings. They wouldn’t tell me why, but it haven’t been an issue for me. But we met in DC quarterly and came up with the concept of, if I have a business that’s willing to verify who they are and provide a lot of data to me, and I can vouch for their identity, in exchange with giving you that information, would you treat their communications appropriately and not call them fraud and not call them spam? And they agreed. Moving that forward, I actually don’t exchange any financials with the carriers. I just give the data away to them. My buyers are the businesses. That was just the beginning point of using identity to solve a problem. But I didn’t have it in any standard. It was just the concept. Would you accept identity in gain for something of the one whose identity is being shared?

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Okay. Well, that was really—I love that background. Appreciate that. And I have a few things I want to double-click on there. The first thing was that you were having a conversation in 2016 about robocalling. Here we are. It’s 2025. Tell me why. Tell me. It’s still happening, and actually, why is it still such a problem? Yeah, and it’s getting worse. And I know that there are things out there, right? And so I don’t think in this podcast we need to go into STIR and SHAKEN and all these other approaches that have been trying to be taken in the market and whatever, but we don’t need to go that so deep. It would be useful to get a little bit of context of, like, why is this not solved already, and why is so much fraud still happening over calls?

Rebekah Johnson: So what you don’t realize as a consumer is that there actually has been some progress. So we don’t talk about the warranty calls anymore. We don’t talk about Rachel from Card Services. I don’t know if you remember that one. That actually used to be my joke, and I said, if we just find Rachel, we’ll solve the problems. Some of those fraud tactics have actually stopped because there was the first entrance of, let’s just label it fraud or spam. That’s because the bad actors would blast. Their communications look obvious on the network. It would be like millions of calls spike up on a particular line. And so we’re able to stop those. The reason why it continues today is because the bad guys change their strategy. We’re always trying to get out ahead of the fraudulent actors, and they are changing faster than we are. So the reason why you continue to get the calls today, and I’ll say today’s, like, main strategy is each of the carriers, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, they’ve had data breaches, and that data breach has been your individual information.

Rebekah Johnson: And AT&T’s was the worst of the call detail record. It was so bad that the Department of Justice didn’t even notify the community that this had happened because it was a matter of national security. So what we have is sophistication. We don’t have the blast, so they hide. They can just do targeted, informed. They have information on you. They know who your bank is. So now they can be more strategic, and that’s harder to address when we’re just looking at patterns on the network. Usher in the need for identity.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Has this been made more challenging too by voice over IP and players like a Twilio, or like, I just call them out because, like, the biggest or whatever, right? But there’s a gazillion of these players that let you make phone calls from the internet or whatever, virtual numbers and virtual. Is this problem made, like, exacerbated because of these players as well?

Rebekah Johnson: Yes, yes. And it’s not that they did that intentionally. I work very closely with people, and even team up in the space of trying to stop fraud with representatives from Twilio, Bandwidth, Five9, like all these major players, because it wasn’t their responsibility to police the network. And that’s what changed when the FCC started passing rules around this. And then Congress got involved with the TRACE Act in 2019, one of the last things Trump signed, and now they’re responsible. But it’s a really challenging thing to do because you’ll have a Twilio who has a customer, who has a customer that services a customer.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Rebekah Johnson: How are they supposed to know who’s using that network? They only know their customer. So this is why you started to hear concepts of, you got to know your customer and you got to know your customer’s customers. And that is what I brought to Numeracle, our team. We brought that concept to Telecom, our entity identity management platform solves all of that. So it’s being used by some of these carriers to be able to get that tiering and that relationship out. It’s not fully adopted, but I will say that it’s not intentional, but it is a revenue hit when you start to look at how much of your traffic is actually fraudulent versus good.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. That’s helpful framing on kind of why this problem still exists. Maybe I’d like to just dig in one layer deeper on what Numeracle does specifically. If I get a call, right, and it says the phone number, and then it says that it also has a little subtext that says it’s from Disney or something, I see this kind of thing sometimes. Is Numeracle involved in that? And if so, like where in the chain does Numeracle fall?

Rebekah Johnson: Yeah. So there’s actually an element of identity that exists today, and it goes back to the ‘80s. I might go further back, and that’s called the caller ID. Everybody has that today. You’ve seen it on your landlines. You see it on your mobile devices. There’s absolutely no controls over that data. Anybody can have it say whatever they want. There’s really no checks and balances on the information is correct, and nobody’s actually cared, meaning the carriers that render that data over to your device. they don’t actually care. They don’t care if it’s right or wrong. It doesn’t matter to them.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Rebekah Johnson: Because of that, fraudulent actors are spoofing those numbers, and so it will say Disney. And I’m making this distinction because we’re in the midst of two solutions on the exact same network, because we can’t stop a network and move everybody to a new telecom network. It’s never going to happen. So we’re actually fixing this thing, changing the tires while we’re on the road, right? So you’ll see that today. That will come through with a name, might have a number. Don’t trust it. That’s all I can tell you. Don’t trust it. Always question it. The next iteration, within the exact same framework, same devices that you have today, there is a way to trust the information, and that’s what Numeracle—gosh, this is why I sit on the standards involved in that level, having conversations, doing proof of concepts. Gosh, we put out, yeah, 2020, did some proof of concepts with T-Mobile and Comcast around the issuance, delivery, rendering, and presentation of verifiable identities. And that’s the new exciting space we are today. It was launched October by T-Mobile. They’re the first to deliver it.

Rebekah Johnson: I can tell you good news: Apple, Motorola, and Samsung are ready and prepared to present this verified identity information to you today. It requires the carrier to update their network to pass that identity data to the device. So for T-Mobile subscribers, today. If your phone rings, let’s say it’s an Apple device, and this verified identity information is coming through, your phone’s going to ring with the logo next to it, a really nice-looking logo, and it will have the name and a number, and it presents very differently than the way that your calls come through today. It’s an obvious visual that cannot be spoofed. No bad actor can leverage that. Not possible. On a Motorola and Samsung, they’ve actually taken it a step further. Oddly enough, Apple is the ugliest rendition of this data. For Motorola and Samsung, at the time of your call, T-Mobile is going to actually state, T-Mobile verified business call. You can trust that. There’s going to be a little green check mark next to that. You can trust that. There will be a logo, there will be a name, and there’ll also be a call reason.

Rebekah Johnson: If it’s your airline calling back, it might be, Flight changes, flight delayed, or the contact center calling you back. So you’re going to have more rich, informed information on the device, and we’re doing that deliberately because we’ve really got to make the phone look different for you to trust the data. We can’t make trusted data with bad data with the same presentation. It’s not good.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. And that’s always a challenge with any kind of a verified, presenting any kind of verified information to a user. Okay, who verified it? Why? How should I trust it? How do I know that it’s not a bad actor who got verified or something? Some website that got a free SSL cert and is presenting as like a legit website when it’s really not, or something like that. And so it sounds like you’re solving that by making the UX dramatically different. And when I say you solving that, what I mean is—

Rebekah Johnson: The industry.

Riley Hughes: I would say it’s a lot of players that have to get on board. And so, when I say I have this Apple device, I’m on T-Mobile, I get a call that’s coming in that’s really branded this way. Where does Numeracle play?

Rebekah Johnson: We’re issuing the identities, and then I refer to branding assets. So once you have an identity, there’s all this other data that you can add on to it. So specifically for the telecom delivery pathway, there will be branding assets. So we store, we verify, validate that information, store it, and then our system is making the intelligent attachment to the phone call right before it gets delivered, literally nanoseconds right before it gets delivered. That data will be pulled in and attached to the call, and it can be dynamic, it can change. It just depends on the logic that the customer, the business, is using to deliver calls. They’ll be making the decisions of what data to attach, but you can only get it from the verified data store. So that will be attached, it gets delivered through the network, and then once that call with that verified information is delivered, we will know the moment it happens. So we’re going to get a response back from the carriers. We received this data, we successfully rendered it. Sometimes all of the data renders. Sometimes it doesn’t. This is all new.

Rebekah Johnson: We’ve got some things to work out.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I was going to say, is this required like a data connection or something? Like, how is this all loading so quickly?

Rebekah Johnson: It’s being pushed down. There is a central repository that is being leveraged by CTIA, so we’ll all have to make updates. And then certificates are issued. We’re using stir/shaken. I know we’re not going to go down that pathway, but we are. There are certificates.

Riley Hughes: That’s helpful to know.

Rebekah Johnson: Yeah. Bad guys can get a certificate and sign a call, but it’s going to be these little special certificates that are only the ones allowed to be used for delivering this branded information. So there’s a whole oversight. There’s auditing. And what’s also really nice about this is if you did, let’s say you wanted to be a bad actor and you use some kind of shell company that passes through the vetting and verification. You commit fraud with that identity, you’ve attached yourself to every communication that you’re committing fraud. And now we have the victim, and we have the victimizer. It just makes discovery a lot easier. It makes identifying the bad guy a lot easier. And they’re also going to have to pay per call. Every time this data is presented to a consumer, there is a charge for it. So it’s not really a good pathway for the fraudulent actors to invest in.

Riley Hughes: Interesting. So let me, with this kind of… this intro to Numeracle, let me try to frame this up in a way that makes sense to me, and you tell me if this is accurate. The telecommunications industry is experiencing this challenge with fraudulent calls. Over the last handful of years, various standards, SHAKEN/STIR, et cetera, have been developed to address this and is starting to roll out into the wild. And Numeracle is playing a role in that ecosystem by verifying businesses and issuing them a business ID compatible with this new standard, riding that wave for businesses that want to show up as legitimate and assert themselves as a legitimate business to interact with consumers. Is that fair?

Rebekah Johnson: That is it. Yes, that is it. If only I was that simple, but yes.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. So one question I wanted to ask you is just having been in the decentralized identity space now for seven years or something, and seeing various standards get created, and some of which get adopted and others of which do not get adopted, and it’s just, you’ve seen this movie play out a bunch of times. How did you have the conviction? What caused you to, however many years ago, say, like when four years ago Rebekah was looking at this space and thinking, okay, this is going to be a while because it’s an industry standard, and we got to get the telcos involved, we got to get the device manufacturers involved, we have to get the businesses to buy into it, we have to do all these things. How did you have the conviction to, was it patience? Was it, did you know it was going to happen somehow? And for others who are waiting for their industries to catch up to their futuristic visions, what advice would you give to other founders who are operating in healthcare or finance or other spaces that move relatively slowly with these kind of standards?

Rebekah Johnson: I will share this, and I actually hope your listeners take it to heart. When you are called, and you know what the calling means, it means you can’t do anything else but what you’re called to do. It’ll actually be a stress inside your head. It’ll be a stress inside your soul. If you’re not doing what you’re called to do, you’re not going to be happy. So let’s say you answer the call, which is what I did. I did have options. I could have got a job and all these other things, but I was like, Oh, I feel like I’m abandoning something. I didn’t know where the future was going to go. I didn’t know that we were going to need to change mobile devices. I didn’t know how this was going to play out. I just knew that I had to do something. To your point of some people are in this space doing the identity, they know where the future should be, but that doesn’t mean that’s your role. And I think visionaries are the ones that pursue the vision. Whether or not in their lifetime they’re actually going to realize it.

Rebekah Johnson: We’ve got so many great leaders who got movements started, and then the one who sees the vision actually come to life might be somebody completely different. So I accept that. And so then that allows me to just look at what is my role for today. How do I advance this? Because if I’m not talking about it and I’m not doing anything, I’m not advancing it. So that’s why I get really inspired from people like you as well. You’re called to do this, and you didn’t allow where, okay, I thought this is how everything was going to go. It didn’t go the way that I wanted. You don’t give up. You have to keep pushing the narrative. So you don’t realize that you were an inspiration to me that gave me the ability to keep going the next day. And then I hope I do that with others. But I accept that my lifetime might not see what I have that vision of where this should go, and it is on a global scale, and it’s beyond telecom. But it is my responsibility to just keep moving it forward, and I’m okay with that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that a lot. I think maybe it was like a Jeff Bezos-ism or something, or maybe it was just apocryphal and ascribed to him anyway, but something along the lines of, be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the strategy, or something like that.

Rebekah Johnson: Yeah, yeah.

Riley Hughes: And I feel like this represents my experience here in the identity space, where we’ve, as a company, we’ve pivoted a handful of times to find the right, like with the same long-term vision in mind, but just maybe a more pragmatic take on how to take the first step or something like that. And that’s served us really well in not being too dogmatic, but also not losing sight of where we want to go long term.

Rebekah Johnson: Yep.

Riley Hughes: And I wonder, did you have experiences like this over the last handful of years, right? Like what pivots or iterations were in your company’s life that you think were relevant to talk about here?

Rebekah Johnson: Absolutely. And at the end of the day, these are businesses, right? They’re not nonprofit charity, and there’s some great nonprofit activities around identity, right? But I got to feed my family. We were a bootstrap, absolutely no investment funds. I tried to go down that pathway. Nobody was going to invest. I really got tired of doing pitches and seeing so many of those luggage— there was so many luggage pitches. I was like, oh my God, for luggage storage. So I was a little different and unique, and they’re like, what are you talking about? Fraud, spam, like how are you solving this? It was just too loosey-goosey, and really we were the first ones in the space. I realized very quickly the time and effort that I was putting into fundraising was useless. And so what if I just focused on what I know that I can do and what I can achieve? And the moment you can literally see it in our revenue graphs, boom, we start making revenue. I’m selling a product, I am invoicing and receiving the funds. And so that was a nice little pivot.

Rebekah Johnson: But then the next phase that I went through was, oh good, I have buyers. Okay, they need to know this and this. I was so in depth in my knowledge on what this problem was, what the solution is, what data is available. And so I was putting up like, you need to see this report, you need to gather this data, you need to make these decisions, and this is how you’re going to change things. And I couldn’t sell the product. It like went stale. I was like, oh my gosh, what are we doing wrong? And so finally, I was just kind of like one of those knock upside the head, and I go, you know what? I give up. I’m just going to give the market what they want. All they want is for their phone calls to not say spam or fraud. That’s not identity. That wasn’t anything really fun that I wanted to talk about. But I was like, okay, fine, I’ll just do that. And it made me actually feel stupid because I felt like there was a much more intelligent product. Ego will get in your way. So I was like, forget it. Just put myself aside. And then again, boom, that’s when we really took off.

Rebekah Johnson: And I was like, this is the simplest solution. So we started helping the customers. Number one, we had to create awareness before we could actually educate customers because nobody knew this was a problem. So we go through the awareness, the learning, and now I have an educated market, which is cool and exciting to see from the very beginning stages, and it goes through. So we found that little sweet spot where, when can we start moving this conversation to identity? Because I never lost that as what I wanted to do. The rubbocalls was the birthplace for business identity. Felt very strong about that. So about two years into it, we finally launched and said, what you’re actually using is an identity management platform, EIM. And so we rolled it out, and then the customer was coming back to us because they had identity issues in messaging, identity issues in email, and I’m like, get it. The buyer gets it. The market gets it. So we actually started having the market come to us on how do we solve other problems we have with our business identity. And that’s just patience.

Rebekah Johnson: It’s taking time, educating your customers. But I do think that’s one of the challenges in the identity space is that everything’s led with identity. And your buyer says, I have an identity problem. Yeah, you do. But yeah, it is so much harder to convince them that they have actually a different problem than they think they have than it is to just say, Okay, great. Yeah, that’s your problem. Sure, here’s the answer, and then build on that knowledge from there.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, yeah, that’s—I appreciate that. I feel like another problem in the identity space tends to be the chicken and egg problem. I feel like half of my podcast episodes we end up talking about this chicken and egg problem. So in the kind of verifiable credential parlance, you are an issuer of this business identity to these businesses. They are the holder of that identity, and in the robocall use case, the, I guess, carrier or the device or whatever is the verifier of that identity, essentially. And in that world, how did you sell a product to the business before T-Mobile had rolled this out, or before Apple and Samsung and Motorola had enabled this functionality to exist on the device? And of course, Apple and Samsung and Motorola aren’t going to roll it out on the devices until there’s businesses who have it, and so there’s this challenge. How did that challenge get overcome in this ecosystem?

Rebekah Johnson: Yeah. So identity was always the underlying theme, but the first step was reputation. So the reputation of the business was being harmed because they were being labeled fraud or spam. So using identity—no one ever saw what we were actually doing with identity. It was just literally verifying the business and then sharing information with the terminating carriers. That data was getting into the network, just at the network level. And then they would use that information to render appropriate data to the customer. So this has been going on. The FCC has weighed in. Congress has weighed in. So regulatory is a very good lever to progress that conversation. And so I just kept talking about, it’s still not trustworthy. We’ve got to get identity delivered. STIR/SHAKEN was a standard that’s been around. Congress, through the TRACE Act, actually required it. So there is a little bit of a nice little advantage that Congress said that there must be an authenticated caller identification information. If that doesn’t scream identity, I don’t know what does.

Rebekah Johnson: So I picked up on that little tiny part and worked with the standards. We’ve had adjustments that are made in the standards, have the data being delivered, and then accept it. Now, getting the devices, this is where you have to partner with the network. I was never going to get the devices to change. Apple’s not going to even—they don’t care who I am. Motorola doesn’t care who I am. Samsung doesn’t. But who does is the carrier. So you’ve got all this regulatory pressure coming onto the carrier, and the carrier can solve the problem. The carrier can get the identity information, but they are dependent on the device to render. So they did the hard work, and I’m going to give T-Mobile credit. T-Mobile did the very hard work to reach out and talk with each of those device manufacturers, and I was actually excited to participate in the different iterations. So I’ve actually seen the changes. We provided feedback. It had some really ugly starts to it, but we all worked together to have a good enough solution to take to the market, and it’s going to adjust and change.

Rebekah Johnson: But that just doesn’t happen overnight. You’ve got to be patient.

Riley Hughes: So if I’m to relate this to maybe something like eIDAS 2.0, which is regulation in Europe that says in the coming years Member states need to issue government IDs digitally to people’s devices or whatever. There’s an anticipation of this thing that will be needed based on regulation.

Rebekah Johnson: Yes.

Riley Hughes: There are certain big players that are pulling strings in the background or whatever, trying to, like, line up the pieces. In this case, maybe T-Mobile working with the devices. How do you, in that world of, like, all this—everybody knows it’s going to happen in the future, everybody’s playing there toward that—but how do you, as a startup founder, sell a product to get paid for it today when everybody knows this is coming, but it’s not yet here?

Rebekah Johnson: It comes down to I’m willing to invest in research and development. That is a big part of what’s important at Numeracle. We don’t sit back and wait for us. others. So driving the proof of concepts, driving the conversation around how everybody who participates in the POC can make money, and they do. Everybody gets a little something. That’s a motivator to get people to move along. And I also, I live in the D.C. area. I visit with the FCC, FILEX, Partes, speak at a lot of events. I’ve worked with House and Senate members because this is a hot topic. We’re able to make more progress because it’s a topic that everyone is aware of. Fraud hits consumers. Fraud hits businesses, and all that fraud is committed on the single channel voice. That is the number one channel still used. So it’s a lot easier to—it’s not easy, but I think it makes more sense, which is why I thought this was the birthplace, because it just, everything just seemed to line up of all the interested parties and the power that those parties have with either the sledgehammer, the stick that they have.

Rebekah Johnson: And then I came in to try to be the carrot, which was how do I take all of these standards, regulations, an old infrastructure network, and figure out a revenue-generating solution off identity? And that was a challenge. And figuring that out, it took a long time, but I think that’s part of why we’re successful. I am connected in all those spaces.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. I’m imagining how the conversation might go. My understanding is you’re primarily, your buyers primarily are the businesses that want to assert themselves in a trustworthy way to the consumer. And if the buyer looks at the landscape and goes, It’s only T-Mobile that has rolled this out on their network, like, why don’t I wait until it’s Verizon and AT&T jump in, or something? I’m sure that type of conversation happens, and especially before T-Mobile rolled it out, especially before the device manufacturers rolled it out. How did, like, why were these businesses willing to pay you in advance of—even today, right? Like, even with just T-Mobile out there.

Rebekah Johnson: This is one of those things, and what you’re thinking, we get asked that a lot, and I think it’s a natural reaction. I think not everybody is adopting it and using it, then I’m not going to use it. It’s valuable to the T-Mobile customers. It is a 100% guarantee. So no one goes out to market and say, Until I’ve got all the market reach, I’m not going to roll out a product. That’s very foolish. That’s very narrow-minded in that approach. So you might as well secure a third of your traffic, and it’s pretty even. It’s across the board. Google, because we did the Google Voice. I think we were actually the number one user of Google Voice. I was so sad when they sunsetted it, but they only represented between one, maybe two percent of our customers’ traffic, so it didn’t make a dent. But T-Mobile is typically 30% of your consumer base. So if you can protect your identity on 30% of the traffic you’re delivering, that’s a win. That’s a win. And so it is just a matter of time for the other carriers. It’s a lot of work. Network updates.

Rebekah Johnson: They have to actually work out their contracts with the device manufacturers on how to render the information. There’s a data exchange, but it will happen, and we’ll just get there. But use it now, otherwise you’re not protected.

Riley Hughes: One other area that I think might be interesting to explore together is how business identity and consumer identity differ. You mentioned at the beginning of the call that, you know, you got captivated by the idea of identity, but that consumer identity wasn’t going to be your path. And I just, I wanted to double-click in that and hear maybe why that was the case. And as I think about some of these regulations with regard to mobile driver’s licenses and with, like, even just in my state here that I live of Utah, where there is a mobile driver’s license, but there’s also a strong contingent who doesn’t like the mobile driver’s license because of its privacy implications on—because it’s maybe not the most sophisticated mobile driver’s license in terms of its privacy protections. And we see this in Europe as well, right, with eIDAS 2.0. I’m sure we’re going to see more legal kind of things. We’re going to see more people rising up to wave the flag of whatever it is that they’re wanting to do. But it seems like business identity just fundamentally has a different set of problems.

Riley Hughes: And so I wonder if you could speak to that and your perspective on how these two markets are evolving in parallel but slightly differently.

Rebekah Johnson: Yep. So I’m a firm believer to stay in your lane. I know nothing about consumer sales, consumer products. I am a pure B2B. At one point I was government, actually worked in weapons of mass destruction. I’ve never known what to do for a consumer. It’s so outside my wheelhouse. But because I was in the B2B, we did deal with a lot of consumer data. So I was a privacy and security officer at one point responsible for, back in the day, removing Social Security numbers. What the heck were we thinking?

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Rebekah Johnson: So I’m very well rehearsed on what’s needed to protect consumer data, PII or PHI. I dealt with healthcare, HIPAA privacy and security as well. When I looked at the business side, I was honestly like, Oh my God, yes. I don’t have to deal with any of those rules because I know what’s involved. I absolutely do. And I knew that would be a hindrance to my ability to just do a startup, right? Launch my little product on AWS for 20 bucks a month, right? Fortunately, it’s how we start. And I didn’t have to think about protecting the business data, and we still do not have consumer data, and I don’t want it. So, you know, that was a very deliberate approach, which is why I think the business identity has a much better adoption, because there’s not that security concern. And it truly is a solution for the business where there’s an ROI that can be calculated, and it’s a selfish identity one, whereas I think on the consumer side, you want the business to care about the— customer, the consumer, and what protections it provides to them. But I’m so sorry to say that really just doesn’t matter.

Rebekah Johnson: It doesn’t matter in government. It doesn’t matter with businesses. That’s really not going to be the focus. That’s why we have to have laws to make it a focus.

Riley Hughes: And you mean, I assume you mean that the business or government or whatever, they’re just not on the top of their list of what they’re prioritizing.

Rebekah Johnson: Yeah. No, they’ll say protect consumers, but it’s a lot easier to just get your SOC audit or PCI audit and say, I did it and that’s done, and you can control that budget, and then you just wait for your breach notifications if you have to do it and you got insurance for that. That’s the reality.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. It’s an interesting insight too, because the business identity helps them make money. And the consumer identity, like how’s a consumer going to make money off of their mobile driver’s license?

Rebekah Johnson: It should be free, and I know that’s a challenge with, I think the consumer identity is where’s the revenue off of it? I hope that by establishing business identity and that concept that I’ve always believed in, that I can have two identities that have a connection and that would allow for the free flow of data in a secure way. So if the consumer’s data is actually stored behind their connection now, business might go, you know what, that’s an investment I’ll make, because now the data is not stored with me. It’s not on my network. I can reduce my costs and overhead and the security. I can reduce my risk posture. My insurance gets to come down. Like, you could have that whole conversation. So I believe that it will get there, but I feel like it’s my job. I’ve got to get this business identity really adopted and up and running, and then I think we can get there.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, interesting. When you’re talking about business identity, I guess we never really defined that in a very nuanced way. But in your case, this is mostly about brand. Is that right? Or is there—are you going into the level of beneficial ownership and other types of KYB business identity as a part of this?

Rebekah Johnson: Yes, actually. So our EIM platform actually is established for the issuance of the identity and then the control of the business, let’s say it’s the business whose identity, through an LOA, a letter of authorization. This is actually all documented. There’s legal terms around it. They will, through our platform, allow other business entities to use their identity for communications, because that identity is going to be outside of what the business is doing. So, for an example, I’ll take—let’s just take like a Home Depot or a Lowe’s, right? An organization that the brand knows what their name is. They’re in the business of hardware and stocking their shelves and retail. They’re not telco. So they’re going to leverage typically three, maybe up to five communication providers. There could be a communication provider for notifications related to recalls, a communication provider for installations. And so with our platform, they’ll have their identity established once, and then that identity can be used to who they allow.

Rebekah Johnson: Now, they can fire that provider, and then that breaks the LOA, and that provider can no longer use that customer’s identity to deliver communications. So that’s how it is established. I think the biggest chain that we have is around five. So that’s out from Numeracle, we’re the root, and then going down through the chain, I think it goes out to about five right now and works great. And we’ve got the chain and that data. What’s interesting— I can see when people are moving around. So now we’re gonna have that data. Oh wow, I see where people are jumping. So I’m not doing anything with that data, but it’s just interesting to see.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, yeah, interesting. What I was planning to do next is ask a question about AI. So, we’ve been talking about robocalls this entire interview, and I think, rightfully, I recently had a relative fall victim to a robocall, and it’s just thousands of dollars and whatever painful outcome that was, and it was truly a problem that needs to be solved.

Rebekah Johnson: Yes.

Riley Hughes: I applaud you for tackling it and for tackling it for so long. But the other part of me thinks, what happens when robocalls turn good in the sense that we have AI agents operating on behalf of organizations or individuals, right? If I could call ahead to those eight restaurants I like and just ask which ones are available, and I just have a little computer voice do the calling and the talking for me, that would be convenient. I’d like that. So how do you think this plays out in a world where maybe robocalls can also be good?

Rebekah Johnson: Yeah. So I’ve always believed that robocalls are good, and they have a lot of value still today for the consumer. So when I think about AI, I will state this: AI will usher in the need for identity. It absolutely will. So AI, specifically to telecommunications, is so irrelevant. What is relevant is the AI will be used for impersonation by fraudulent actors. That’s basically it. That’s going to be their use. It’s impersonation.

Riley Hughes: That’s the concern, right?

Rebekah Johnson: Correct. And they’re doing it, right? So that’s happening today. So I don’t necessarily—the FCC put out some notices, and I know that under the new administration, the executive order on AI was removed. I was actually already moving down work on that. So we’ll have to wait for, I think, David Sacks to come back and give some more guidance on what we need to do from an innovation perspective. But the initial focus was to identify AI. You have to self-identify. Okay, that doesn’t matter. Like, we’ve been using AI. We just have a better term that everybody’s using, but it’s not like it just popped up last year. That’s been used in communications for a long time. So what matters? is if you can trust that the entity behind that AI is who they say they are. I don’t want to hinder the use of AI, and that was some of the regulations I was seeing coming. It’s, ah, we’re actually going to hinder the power of AI for the good guys. All the bad guys, they don’t care. They’re not going to follow.

Rebekah Johnson: So this comes back to what our mission is at Numeracle, and we believe that every person on the planet and every entity on Earth should know with certainty the identity of who or what they are communicating with. And the what is the AI, and the who is the entity behind it. So we need to get to a place—I think it’s fine to use that AI information behind the call once you made the connection for T-Mobile customers who are leveraging the delivery of identity, because it’s just a connection. After that connection, you should trust whatever conversation with whatever bot or whatever tool is behind that connection.

Riley Hughes: Interesting. Yeah, that’s an interesting take, because it doesn’t really matter if it’s robos calling, as long as you know who’s controlling the robo behind the scenes. The important part.

Rebekah Johnson: Exactly.

Riley Hughes: This was a really interesting conversation, Rebekah. I’m glad we got to do it, and I think it’ll be a really useful one for our listeners, both for getting another perspective on a type of digital identity ecosystem, but for businesses and applying it to this kind of fraud over voice use case, but also just your journey as a founder and how you stuck it out and followed this calling to this spot where you’re at now. Again, I applaud you for the work that you’re doing, and I’ve enjoyed following the Numeracle journey, and I’m glad that you joined us on the episode.

Rebekah Johnson: Thank you. It’s really a pleasure to be on this with you, and I hope we can do some updates in the future and we’re actually making more progress.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, yeah. In the meantime, if there are people listening who are interested in connecting or learning more or getting their own business identity, I don’t know, maybe—I don’t make a lot of outbound calls, but I don’t know if Trinsic could get our business identity issued to us somehow. That would be interesting. So if there are folks listening who want to get in touch or think they have something to work with you on, where would you direct them?

Rebekah Johnson: So they should just go to numeracle.com. We actually have a lot of information depending upon what your role is in this ecosystem and how you can participate in delivering the identity through telecom. So we can help you. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges, is knowing what your role is, and we can help you play your role.

Riley Hughes: Great. Awesome. Well, with that, thanks again, and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this content, please share it with others who will benefit from it. I’ve been getting some great feedback on the podcast recently, and since we don’t do a lot of self-promotion or ads or whatever, sharing the word really is the best way to signal to us that the content is valuable and that we should keep doing it. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or X at Riley P. Hughes, and visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the future of identity. You can also visit trinsic.id/podcast to subscribe to new shows and subscribe to the Future of Identity newsletter, where we’ll share the essential reusable identity news we rely on straight to your inbox.