The networks hold the number data and still can't hand it over

John Wilkinson, CEO of TMT ID, names the assumption his company got wrong: “We assumed mobile networks would be able to provide their data into the fraud industry and the identity verification industry. They don’t.” TMT ID holds data on close to 7 billion mobile numbers across 240 countries and runs around 200 million checks a day, so the gap he’s describing is one he pays for.

The specifics are the useful part. GSMA’s Open Gateway now has 86 operator groups behind it, more than 300 networks and roughly 80% of global mobile connections, with SIM Swap and Number Verification among the first standardized APIs — and Wilkinson’s point is that standard alignment is not a documented, contractually available service in every market you operate in. Operator systems were built to bill subscribers and route traffic, “not to answer a bank’s question about whether a number changed hands last Tuesday.” A subscriber record accurate on the day the account opened may not have been touched since. His buying advice follows from that: ask for match rates broken out by country and operator rather than a blended global figure, ask how the underlying record gets refreshed, and test against your own known-fraud population before signing.

He is selling the assembly work he describes — “someone has to assemble it, market by market and operator by operator, and then keep it current. That work is the product” — so the argument that carriers can’t deliver is also the argument for buying from an aggregator. The structural claim holds anyway, and it sits directly against the state AGs’ comments in the FCC’s KYC docket, which flag bulk SIM purchase and activation as a problem for a later proceeding. Both land on the same place: the party closest to the truth about a number is the one least able to produce it on a decision timeline.