An interview with Henry Hayter, Senior Director of Product Management at TransUnion®
Extensive research confirms phone calls continue to play a central role as an indispensable communication channel for financial institutions. According to a recent TransUnion-commissioned Forrester Consulting study, “Even as phone calls continue to decline in volume, 86% of decision-makers believe it’s the most important outbound channel for meeting customer service goals and increasing revenues.”
Unfortunately, this valuable communication channel has some hurdles to overcome. Impersonation scams, call spoofing and robocalls have created a lack of trust, leading to low answer rates. And new analytics tools that service providers are using to help protect consumers are having the unintended consequence of preventing some legitimate business calls from getting through.
For financial firms, challenges that threaten customer trust and leave organizations vulnerable to financial losses must be addressed quickly and efficiently.
Below is an interview with TransUnion Senior Director of Product Management Henry Hayter about what consumers want from a calling experience — and how banks can protect their customers from phone scams. Additionally, we explore steps you can take to help guarantee the delivery of exceptional customer experiences over the phone, fostering strong relationships and improving communications.
What are the biggest challenges when it comes to reaching customers via phone calls?
While customer service representatives in financial institutions are well-trained and provide excellent service, the challenge lies in getting customers to answer. People often hesitate to answer calls from unknown numbers due to the possibility of being scammed. That really hinders the effectiveness of the voice channel as a means of communication.
Why won’t people answer their phones?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons. According to that same study, 72% of respondents said customers will not answer calls from unknown phone numbers. Around 59% said they just can’t connect to customers. Additionally, 53% cited customer concerns with fraudsters spoofing legitimate companies they’ve previously done business with.
According to the study, “The threat of fraud, like call spoofing, is a major voice channel challenge as customers aren’t sure whether the call is authentic or a bad actor posing as the organization. Sixty-three percent of decision-makers rate call spoofing among their top five challenges in outbound voice (ranking third overall) and the second most common hypothesis as to why existing customers are not answering calls.”
What common issues do banks face in managing the voice channel for customer interactions?
They can be divided into two problem statements. The first has to do with call spoofing which entails a bad actor hijacking a bank's phone number and posing as an employee to deceive customers and steal their money. In fact, impersonation scams were among the top reported frauds to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2024, with consumer losses totaling $2.95 billion. The second problem is nearly a quarter of all legitimate outbound calls are being mislabeled as spam.
In the end, a significant percentage (88%) of calls to customers go unanswered and can prevent a bank from reaching its customers to discuss important issues. The challenge is we want all fraudulent spoofed calls to get blocked — while letting legitimate calls through — but this doesn’t always happen.
Read the blog: Can I Stop My Number From Being Spoofed?
How do phone scams impact banks and other financial institutions?
The most significant attacks we’ve seen recently are scammers pretending to work for a bank and tricking customers into revealing personal information over the phone or authorizing fraudulent transactions —often to commit account takeover fraud (ATO) fraud.
TransUnion customers reported ATO accounted for 7% of digital fraud globally in 2023 — growing 18% annually and surpassing credit card fraud as the most frequent type. (TransUnion 2024 State of Omnichannel Fraud) Over 4.5 million US adults were victims of ATO in 2023, costing them nearly $13 billion (Javelin 2024 Identity Fraud Study)
Fraudsters often use call spoofing to facilitate ATO by scamming consumers into giving up their account credentials. Our research shows a 55% increase in high-risk calls into US call centers from 2022 to 2023 (H2 2025 Update to the TransUnion Top Fraud Trends Report) That same report showed nearly a third (31%) of US business leaders cited ATO as the most prominent cause of reported fraud losses.
You’ve probably also read about Zelle® fraud. Zelle is a digital payment platform for transferring funds from one account to another. Zelle fraud is more targeted than other phone scams and often begins with a spoofed call where a fraudster poses as a bank representative. The scammer then convinces the victim to reveal their personal information or security details so they can log into their account and help correct a banking ‘error’ —which doesn’t actually exist. The fraudster may then initiate an unauthorized wire transfer or convince their victim to transfer money themselves into the scammer’s account under the guise of fixing the error. These scams often employ complex social engineering schemes, making them highly convincing and harder to detect.
Download the e:Book: Fraudsters Set Their Sights on Financial Firms
What solutions does TransUnion offer to address these challenges?
TransUnion Trusted Call Solutions help enterprises optimize outbound call operations, increase contact rates, improve customer experiences and protect their brand reputation. Several of our solutions are described below.
Caller Name Optimization ensures the name of the calling institution appears consistently on outbound calls, providing consumers with the information they need to decide if they want to answer. In addition, this protects a company’s phone numbers from being mistakenly blocked or mislabeled by service providers’ analytics systems.
Caller ID Authentication deploys technology to authenticate outbound calls coming from the financial institution's telephony environment. Instead of the telecom provider guessing if the call is legitimate, the bank can provide its own verification. Any call that doesn’t have this verification will be identified as a spoofed call — which the service provider will then stop before it ever reaches the consumer.
Spoofed Call Protection verifies the call was originated by the enterprise and enables calls to be blocked before reaching and unsuspecting consumer — preventing fraudsters from spoofing enterprise telephone numbers.
Branded Call Display authenticates the call and enables a name, logo or other branding to appear on the mobile display. When a customer receives a call, they see essential information: verification of the call, confirmation it’s from the bank, and reason for the call, such as an appointment or payment reminder.
Read the Forbes Tech article: How Businesses Can Rebuild Trust in the Age of Impersonation Scams
Can you share any statistical data on the tangible impact these solutions have had on financial institutions?
Here’s one example: A financial institution customer faced low answer rates during its collection efforts, leading to payment delays and elevated delinquencies. To address this, we conducted tests where the bank incorporated its brand using Branded Call Display as part of its outbound calling strategy. The results were impressive: a 122% increase in right-party contact rates and 135% increase in payment rates. Moreover, it delivered the calls in a high-value way, improving customer experiences and business results.
Watch the American Banker webinar with Henry Hayter, Senior Director for Product at TransUnion, featuring guest speaker Max Ball, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.
