Demand for better authentication and verification continues to grow as frauds, hackers, and spammers run rampant throughout the Internet. Companies like Telesign are helping keep the fraudulent activities at bay. Headed by Steve Jillings, Telesign's focus is on Mobile Identity services. They accomplish this by analyzing data associated with phone numbers. Whether it's helping verify online transactions or preventing the creation of fake accounts, Telesign is able to detect fraudulent accounts by using a bevy of tools including predictive data, fraud alerts, and traffic patterns.
Continue reading below to find out more about Telesign and PhoneID, as well as some advice for up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
In another interview, you said that "you make so many mistakes and learn so many lessons that you understand what to do". Is this the only key for someone to achieve the success you have?
There is no substitute for experience. You either learn from your own mistakes or you learn from someone else's. Clearly there are cases of young people being incredibly lucky and coming up with brilliant ideas, but in almost all of those examples, there is usually someone in the background that brings the experience to the table. Experience is not the only key to success, but it is a big one. Being able to build a team, motivate them, create the vision, understand when a change in direction is needed, be able to read and interpret market forces, there are so many things required for success.
If you're really trying to shake-up an industry and make an impact in an area you're passionate about, you're going to make mistakes, have set-backs -even fail. And that's OK as long as you take those lessons, learn from each of them and apply them moving forward.
Today, Internet-related businesses are booming. Is it your belief that being successful in this market is easier than other markets, or does it requires the same (or even a bigger) amount of hard work?
Running a successful business, regardless of industry, is never "easy", but that doesn't mean it can't be a lot of fun. For every Internet success story you've read about, there are literally thousands in their wake that just didn't make it. Given the pace of change with internet businesses, you could argue it's even more difficult compared to other industries where the pace of change is much slower. Today, you can have a business model built around a mobile app that took a few days to develop, if you can differentiate against your competitors, you can be successful. You can also disappear as fast as you showed up. For every Tinder, WhatsApp or SnapChat, there are millions of wannabes that will never gain critical mass.
With the boom I mentioned above, it seems that people are investing their time and their money in the Internet business market. Any advice for entrepreneurs starting their companies?
I was talking to a good friend recently who was changing jobs and heading to a start-up. My advice to him was to make sure that what the company was doing really could be a solid stand-alone business. Could it be a real company or was it simply a feature? We see this all the time at TeleSign. Someone will approach us and think they have the next category killing technology when all they really have is a feature that will not change anything. Getting to scale is hard.
Once you have come across what you believe to be a real market changing opportunity, my best advice is to assemble the right team. Seek out proven players who can own their part of the business and as important, can play well with the rest of the team. Once you've set the direction, be willing to let them do what they do best and don't micro-manage.
Moving onto Telesign's products, it seems like you're hungry for acquisitions. How many companies have you looked at in the past 6 months?
At TeleSign, we're bringing the next wave of authentication to market. It needs to be fast, easy to implement and use with as little friction as possible for the user. Our own product and development teams continue to impress me every day with their work on these next generation technologies, but we're also talking to a number of young and innovative startups in the US and abroad with interesting capabilities in the areas of biometrics and other frictionless technologies. There are a lot of companies out there today that would thrive under the TeleSign umbrella and it is highly likely that several will join us in the coming year.
Other than two-factor authentication, are there any other authentication mechanisms under your radar?
Two Factor Authentication or 2FA as it is called has been around for a long time. It is just now getting to be mainstream, particularly where it is being made available to consumers all over the world. 2FA has a long way to go as a category and TeleSign fully intends to drive that charge. There are several other areas of authentication and security designed to protect the end user that we are actively evaluating and testing, so don't be surprised to see some new and interesting products come to market in the next 12 months.
One of Telesign's latest services is PhoneID Score, which ranks user's phone numbers using metadata you have on the phone numbers. To what extent do you think this product will improve the safety of websites, apps and services?
TeleSign developed PhoneID Score as a pre-screening service to help predict the likelihood of fraudulent event such as fake account creation. The results so far have been very encouraging and this product gets better every day based on its self-learning capabilities. The more risky transactions we can identify and eliminate the better our clients networks run, the happier our customers are and their users have a far better experience. Everyone wins.
Do you expect any concerns on the user side, related with the privacy of the personal information related to their phone numbers?
TeleSign takes the issue of privacy very seriously, and in fact, we've recently brought on Stephen Bolinger, former Microsoft privacy attorney to be our Chief Privacy Officer. In the case of our PhoneID Score product, we do not use any personal information. We do not know who the user is and that has no bearing on the result. We use metadata and attributes around the phone number itself.
What to you envision for Telesign's future and, more broadly, for the future of authentication processes?
We will continuing to lead the way in authentication services with a focus on making these transactions as easy or "frictionless" for the user as possible. As for today we're working overtime to keep our customers happy. This means anticipating their future needs (which we've been really successful at) based on our deep knowledge of the ever changing security landscape and making large strategic investments in client services and 24 hour support. Having high-quality customer support gives our clients more confidence in us and keeps them coming back.
Anything else to add that I might have missed about TeleSign?
In 2012, we acquired Routo Telecommunications, a London based licensed Mobile Network Operator (MNO). That acquisition allowed TeleSign to have direct relationships with Mobile Operators all over the world. This has proven to be a huge value driver for TeleSign, not only for our core business but also in its ability to influence our future product development roadmap. We've invested heavily in our London based Carrier Services team who are working closely with many Mobile Operators enabling TeleSign to roll out really innovative security services globally. This represents a great new area of opportunity for TeleSign.
It will be exciting to see what Telesign does in the coming months and years, considering that they are definitely eyeing for new acquisitions. They already offer a thorough range of services, and it will be interesting to see where they take that next.
