XCONNECT XPERT INSIGHTS | Q&A SERIES
Reliable number intelligence underpins decisions across voice, messaging, fraud prevention and identity – but what actually makes telecoms data trustworthy?
As phone numbers are ported, reassigned and increasingly used as part of digital identity, keeping number intelligence accurate, current and accessible is becoming more complex; and more important.
We sat down with Susan Duker, Chief Technology Officer at XConnect, to explore what it takes to maintain reliable number intelligence at global scale, why accessibility matters as much as accuracy, what organisations should look for in a data provider and how AI and mobile identity are changing what comes next.
In this Q&A:
Data reliability • Global number intelligence • Data accessibility • Choosing a provider • AI and trusted data • The future of number intelligence
Why is reliable telecoms number intelligence more important than ever?
Telecoms number intelligence sits underneath almost everything that matters in our industry. Voice routing, messaging delivery, identity verification, fraud prevention — all of it depends on knowing whether a number is real, active, and behaving as expected. If that foundation is shaky, everything built on top of it is shaky too.
What’s changed is the scale and speed at which things go wrong. Numbers change hands constantly — through porting, recycling, reassignment — and fraudsters are very good at exploiting the gaps left by stale data. A wrong routing decision costs money. A misidentified number enables fraud. A failed OTP loses a customer.
The bottom line is that it’s no longer enough to simply have a database of numbers. Voice, messaging, identity and fraud products are all making decisions in real time — and they need a foundation they can actually trust.
What makes telecom numbering data reliable?
Reliable data isn’t built in one step — it’s the result of several disciplines working together, and all of them have to be right. A weakness in any one area can undermine every decision being made downstream.
It starts with authoritative sources. We work directly with regulators, operators and official numbering plan administrators — not aggregators working from secondhand information. From there the data is validated, cleansed, normalised and structured consistently — because when you’re operating across multiple markets, consistency is everything.
But the factor people underestimate most is continuous updates. Telecoms data changes constantly — porting, reassignment, regulatory changes, new numbering plans. Data that was accurate six months ago may not be accurate today. Reliability isn’t a one-off achievement. It’s an ongoing commitment.
What does it take to maintain reliable number intelligence at global scale?
The honest answer is: a lot more than most people realise. Every country has its own regulator, its own numbering plan, its own porting rules, and its own pace of change. An update might arrive as clean structured data in one market and require interpretation, cross-referencing and industry research in another.
Number portability is one of the hardest ongoing challenges — numbers move between networks constantly, and for many of our customers that information needs to be as current as possible. We also operate global infrastructure and Points of Presence in key regions so that data is served quickly and reliably, wherever a query originates.
But what I’m most proud of is the team. They bring together deep technical knowledge and genuine telecoms expertise built up over years. That combination is rarer than you’d think — and it’s not something you can automate your way out of. Managing number intelligence at global scale requires experienced people making informed judgments every single day.
"Managing number intelligence at global scale requires experienced people making informed judgments every single day."
Susan Duker | Chief Technology Officer, XConnect
Why is accessibility just as important as accuracy?
Because accurate data that’s hard to access, slow to retrieve, or inconsistent to use is only half the solution. The other half is making sure that intelligence is actually usable by the people building products and services on top of it.
For us that means developer-friendly integration, clear documentation, low implementation effort, and consistent responses — so developers always get a predictable, well-structured answer. It also means low latency. Telecoms decisions happen in real time — routing, fraud checks, OTP delivery — and if the data lookup takes too long, accuracy becomes irrelevant.
Accuracy gets you to the door. Accessibility gets you through it.
How do you make complex telecoms data easy for customers to understand?
Telecoms numbering is genuinely complex — hundreds of countries, thousands of operators, multiple formats, porting rules, regulatory differences. Our job is to absorb all of that complexity so our customers don’t have to deal with it directly.
We do that by presenting actionable answers rather than raw data. Customers don’t need to understand a country’s numbering plan intricacies — they need to know whether a number is valid, what type it is, and which operator it belongs to. We give them that in a consistent, structured format their systems can consume directly. Less engineering effort, fewer edge cases, faster decisions.
The goal is simple: a stakeholder who knows nothing about telecoms should be able to look at what we return and immediately understand what it means for their business. That clarity is something we work hard to maintain.
"Accuracy gets you to the door. Accessibility gets you through it."
What should organisations look for when choosing a number intelligence provider?
The first thing I’d say is: don’t focus solely on price. The real cost of poor data quality — in failed deliveries, fraud losses, and customer drop-off — almost always outweighs any saving made upfront.
Coverage and update frequency matter enormously — how many markets does the provider cover, and how current is the data? Data provenance matters too: is it coming from authoritative sources, or aggregated from secondhand information? On the technical side, latency, API performance, uptime, scalability and security should all be verified, not assumed. And don’t underestimate support — when something unusual happens in a specific market, you want a provider with genuine expertise, not just a ticket system.
XConnect holds ISO 27001 certification and we’re proud of our consistent record in maintaining it. For us it’s not a checkbox — it reflects the standards we hold ourselves to across data security, quality management and operational resilience. When you’re evaluating providers, independently verified commitment like that should carry real weight.
How is AI changing the way organisations use telecoms data?
There’s a lot of noise around AI right now, so let me cut to what actually matters. AI doesn’t reduce the need for trusted data — it increases it. Whatever model you’re running, whatever decision you’re automating, the output is only as good as the input. Poor data produces poor decisions, and at the speed AI operates, poor decisions compound fast.
In practice this means that well-structured, consistently formatted, machine-readable datasets are becoming more valuable, not less. The investment organisations have already made in data quality — the cleansing, the normalisation, the validation — becomes a genuine competitive advantage when you layer AI on top of it.
And there’s a regulatory angle too. As AI-driven decisions come under more scrutiny, organisations need to explain why a decision was made. That explainability starts with trusted, traceable inputs. If you can’t verify where your data came from, you can’t fully defend the decisions that flow from it.
"AI doesn't reduce the need for trusted data – it increases it."
What does the future of number intelligence look like?
We’re at a genuinely interesting inflection point. Number intelligence has traditionally been a back-end capability — something routing engines and fraud systems use quietly in the background. That’s changing fast.
The datasets are getting richer. We’re moving beyond knowing whether a number is valid and which operator it belongs to, toward real-time network signals — is this number active right now, has the SIM been swapped, is there unusual activity? That’s the intersection of number intelligence and mobile identity, and it’s exactly where XConnect is investing.
The thread running through all of this is integration. Number intelligence, mobile identity, fraud prevention, and customer experience are converging. Our strategy at XConnect is built around that — combining our Number Information Services with our Mobile Identity capabilities to give customers a richer, more coherent view of every number they interact with, in real time, at global scale.
