In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry.
This week, Chief Commercial Officer Robert Jones introduces brand validation and messaging security provider, Brand Assure.
What does Brand Assure do?
At its heart, Brand Assure helps mobile networks and CPaaS providers know who’s really behind a message. We built a platform that validates brands before they can send campaigns, so consumers can trust what lands on their phone. Think of it like a credit check, but for messaging – using company data, digital identity, and open-source intelligence to spot what’s genuine and what isn’t.
When did your company launch and what growth have you seen?
Stour, our parent company, has been around since 2006 as a UK mobile network operator. Brand Assure is the newest part of that journey – we launched the product in 2025 after years of seeing how fragmented and slow brand validation could be. Within weeks of going live it was clear from conversations the industry is ready for a consistent, trusted model.
What are your company’s main goals?
Right now, our priority is to give the UK and Europe a consistent model for RCS Business Messaging validation. Longer term, we want to expand beyond RCS into SMS, voice, and even fraud intelligence – creating a common standard that makes business messaging safer across the board. Everything comes back to one simple principle: verify every sender, protect every subscriber.
Where do you see your company in three years’ time?
In three years, we hope that Brand Assure will be firmly established in the UK and making real progress into European markets. By then, our model will extend beyond RCS into SMS and voice, giving networks and CPaaS providers a single, consistent way to validate brands across channels. Our goal is for validation to feel invisible – it just works, giving consumers confidence and allowing brands to focus on communicating, not compliance.
What aspect of mobile is most exciting to you right now?
For us, it’s the chance to build trust into RCS Business Messaging from day one. Unlike SMS, where sender validation has always been patchy, RCS gives us a fresh start. If we get this right, we can help operators offer a richer, more secure channel that really competes with the OTTs.
What’s the most critical issue that will hit mobile within the next 12 months?
Smishing and phishing aren’t going away – they’re just getting smarter. We’re already seeing attackers probe new channels like RCS. If networks don’t put robust validation in place now, consumer trust could evaporate before the channel has even scaled. The critical issue isn’t just technology, it’s coordination – networks, CPaaS, and regulators aligning on a consistent approach.
Apart from your own, which mobile companies are the ones to watch in the year ahead?
Google’s next moves with RCS will be pivotal – their influence on how the channel scales can’t be overstated. On the CPaaS side, global CPaaS players are driving enterprise adoption at pace, which in turn puts pressure on networks to simplify onboarding. At the same time, some of the smaller, specialist vendors in the fraud and AI space are doing fantastic work that could reshape how the ecosystem tackles trust and security over the next year.
