The challenge for these cloud players is that voice is different from other cloud-based communications and collaboration technologies. The latter can often be delivered globally from just a few locations. Voice cannot.

The complexity of international voice leaves it open to fraud and bad actors. This can centre around arbitrage and artificially inflated traffic that hits carriers. There’s also a second type of fraud that hits consumers directly – through spamming, spoofing and phishing – which also undermines trust across the market.

Whilst deep long-term thinking is required to solve the second type of fraud (which deserves a post of its own!), the economic risk associated with the first type is both real and significant.

Imagine this scenario: You’re a cloud communications provider, handling a modest volume of 100,000 minutes of UK Mobile Vodafone traffic daily. Normally, you’d expect to connect these calls at a standard rate of 0.005 pence per minute. However, unbeknownst to you – due to issues with number formatting, calls from non-active/invalid numbers, or a lack of control over allowed origins – you find yourself being charged the surcharge rate of £2 per minute.

Now, consider the staggering difference in charges incurred per day: £500 at the standard rate versus a whopping £200,000 at the highest surcharge rate. That’s a 400 times increase!

This lays bare the risk that cloud platforms’ run with voice. If providing a voice service doesn’t sit within their core competency – or if they don’t invest in the necessary team resources to effectively manage all of the complexity that comes with it – they risk exposing their P&Ls.

Enter Wavecrest.

Because we provide voice and messaging functionality as part of an enterprise-grade managed service, we help cloud platforms give their customers what they want – with compliance and fraud management built in. This mitigates some of the risk around fraud, but also ensures that there are no nasty P&L surprises along the way.

It’s an economic case for managed voice that we think is unarguable for cloud players. Secure, compliant and reliable – all while filling a gap in their platform offering.