Jaime Zetterstrom lost her mother before she finished high school. Her father died not long after. Then came the questions adulthood usually lets you take home: Should I accept this job? Should I go to graduate school? Am I making the right decision?

There was no parent to call.

So Jaime built the thing she was missing: her own support structure. She learned to find people who knew her well, had her best interests in mind, and would speak her name in rooms filled with opportunity. Trust, for Jaime, had to be tested and earned.

That experience follows her into every room today. After growing up professionally in telecom, fraud fighting, and the engineering of fraud-fighting products, Jaime now works in a more customer-facing product role at Somos. It gives her an opportunity to become the person she once needed: someone else can bring an uncertain situation to, examine it safely, and leave with more clarity. Her work is ultimately about building trust between humans and humans, humans and machines, and machines and machines.

Jaime has also reached an age neither of her parents did. That changes how she sees financial fraud.

Her parents never had to navigate a world dominated by smartphones, digital relationships, and callers who can look familiar without being legitimate. Jaime sometimes imagines placing her father into today’s ecosystem. What would he do if someone claiming to be his mortgage broker called and asked him to move money? The standard advice in elder-fraud prevention is to call someone you trust before acting. Would he have called her? Would he have known to pause?

The question becomes even more consequential when someone’s life savings are at risk. When Jaime was young, she did not have parents who could bail her out financially. Now she looks at older fraud victims and asks the reverse question: Who will bail them out?

Younger consumers are vulnerable in a different way. They have grown up forming relationships through technology and may mistake familiarity for authenticity. The fundamental question does not change: We still need to know whom to trust.

About The Series

This is the next installment in the One Expert, One Topic series, where field experts select a topic and share essential insights using Matt Abrahams’ What/So What/Now What format. Each piece begins as a live interview. I then turn the conversation into a written article, using AI to help with speech to text and editing. The written format gives you more time to absorb the topic and a starting point for learning more. We are grateful to our contributors for sharing their wisdom.

What

Jaime’s focus is the human side of financial fraud: how communications data can give financial institutions and consumers more confidence about who is on the other side of an interaction.

At Somos, that work takes two complementary forms.

RealAgent helps a financial institution evaluate the person contacting it. Somos is not positioning itself as an identity company or claiming that one signal can establish identity. Instead, RealAgent brings together communications signals that can help an institution decide whether the interaction deserves confidence, additional scrutiny, or a pause.

A financial institution can query RealAgent to see whether the number has been disconnected from its previous subscriber through the Reassigned Numbers Database. That does not reveal the subscriber’s identity. It establishes whether an event has occurred in the relationship between the number and the original subscriber.

The institution can also check whether a name, email address, or physical address matches the available information. An activity score can surface unusual usage patterns, such as a number that appears to make outbound calls but rarely receives inbound calls. RealAgent can also estimate the likelihood that calling a number will reach the person the institution expects, assigning a familiar grade from A through F.

The product is designed to meet institutions where they are. An employee can use the interface directly. A company can incorporate the signals into an existing product. A contact center can consume them during an inbound interaction. The signals do not make the final decision. They give the institution more information with which to make it.

RealBrand addresses the other side of the trust problem: how a legitimate business presents itself to consumers.

It helps brands understand what is happening around the telephone number inventory they use, whether someone may be impersonating them, and what action they can take. That can include authenticated outbound calls, visible branding, blocking, and other measures that make it harder for an impersonator to look, sound, or behave like the real company.

RealAgent helps the institution evaluate the consumer. RealBrand helps the consumer recognize the institution. Together, they make trust more reciprocal.

So What

Caller ID is not authentication. Familiarity is not proof.

The communications network has always known more than the screen shows. The question is whether the right signals can be made available to the right party, at the right moment, without pretending that any single data point provides certainty.

Consider a customer calling a financial institution to initiate a large transaction. If the phone number receives an F contact score, that does not prove the customer is a fraudster. It does create a smoke signal. The institution may pause the transfer, ask additional questions, or require another form of verification before releasing the money.

That pause matters because financial fraud often begins before the transaction. It begins with the conversation.

Jaime recently spent an hour with a financial institution unpacking several fraud incidents. Each example looked different on the surface. But when she and the institution peeled them back, every one began with a phishing call. By the time the money moved, the manipulation had already happened.

This is also why consumer education alone is not enough. Telling people to be more careful places the entire burden on the person facing an increasingly sophisticated fraudster. Consumers have responsibility, but so do financial institutions, communications providers, brands, and the broader ecosystem.

Older consumers may be asked to navigate technology that arrived after the habits and support structures of their lives were already established. Younger consumers may be more comfortable with technology, but that comfort can create its own vulnerability. A profile, logo, phone number, or familiar interface can feel authenticated even when it is not.

The solution is not to remove human judgment. It is to give humans better information before they make an irreversible decision.

Now What

Financial institutions should treat communications intelligence as part of the fraud stack, not as a replacement for identity verification or established controls. Check whether a number has been reassigned. Compare names, email addresses, and physical addresses. Look at activity patterns and the likelihood that the number still reaches the expected person. Then set thresholds that reflect the risk of the transaction.

An F score may warrant a different response for a routine balance inquiry than for a transfer of someone’s life savings.

Brands should also understand that protecting customers begins before the phone rings. Know which numbers represent the company. Authenticate legitimate outbound calls where possible. Monitor for impersonation. Give customers recognizable signals, and have a process for acting when someone begins using the brand as a costume.

Consumers should follow the advice Jaime keeps returning to: before moving money, call someone you trust. Use a number you already know, not one supplied during the suspicious interaction. A few minutes of friction is cheaper than trying to recover a lifetime of savings.

And the industry should keep sharing the stories behind the losses. Jaime would rather begin with the fraud problem than with a product pitch. Bring her the incident. Peel it back. Find where trust first broke and determine what signal, process, or human intervention could have changed the outcome.

Jaime can be reached through Somos, through the financial-services events she posts about on LinkedIn, and through her work with CFCA. She wants to be useful not simply as the person connected to RealAgent and RealBrand, but as a resource for anyone trying to understand what fraudsters are doing and how the ecosystem can respond.

In Jaime’s life and in her work, trust serves the same purpose: it is the support structure you build before the moment you need it.