THE LINUX FOUNDATION PROJECTS

Know Your Customer Tenure

API Description
Use Cases
  • Digital Onboarding Fraud Screening: Developers can use phone number tenure as an additional trust signal during account creation or customer onboarding. Recently activated numbers can be flagged for step-up verification, manual review or additional fraud checks.
  • Authentication Risk Enrichment: Tenure can complement Number Verification, OTP SMS or other authentication methods by adding context about how long the phone number has been associated with the current mobile operator.
  • Account Recovery Protection: During password reset, account recovery or credential change flows, businesses can use tenure to detect higher-risk requests linked to recently activated or recently reassigned phone numbers.
  • High-Value Transaction Risk Assessment: Financial services, payment providers and digital platforms can include tenure in their transaction risk models to identify suspicious activity before approving sensitive or high-value actions.
  • KYC and Identity Verification Support: Tenure can complement Know Your Customer Match and other identity verification APIs by adding an operator-sourced signal of mobile identity stability.
  • Credit and financial Risk Scoring: Lenders, banks and fintechs can use tenure as one input in broader risk scoring models when assessing the credibility or stability of a user associated with a phone number.
  • Age Verification Support: Tenure can complement age-related verification flows by adding an indirect trust signal based on the maturity of the mobile line, especially when used together with dedicated age verification capabilities.
Benefits
  • Stronger mobile Identity Trust: Adds an operator-verified tenure signal to help businesses assess the stability of a phone number used as part of a digital identity.
  • Fraud Risk Reduction: Helps detect recently activated or unstable phone numbers that may be associated with synthetic identity fraud, mule accounts, account takeover or suspicious transaction attempts.
  • Privacy-preserving Verification: Provides a boolean tenure check instead of exposing the underlying activation date or unnecessary customer data.
  • Frictionless User Experience: Enables backend risk assessment without requiring additional user interaction when the phone number is already available or identified through the access token.
  • Better Risk Scoring: Allows businesses to incorporate phone number tenure into automated fraud, onboarding, credit or transaction risk models.
  • Complementary to other CAMARA APIs: Can be combined with APIs such as Number Verification, Know Your Customer Match, SIM Swap, Device Swap or Number Recycling to build a broader mobile identity risk profile.
  • Operator-sourced Reliability: Uses data held by the mobile network operator, providing a more reliable signal than self-declared tenure or user-provided information.

API Portfolio: Authentication and Fraud Prevention

Sub Project Wiki: Know Your Customer
(incl. how to meet the team)

API Wiki: Tenure

API Repository: Tenure

API Repository Status: Sandbox

API Status: Initial

API Version(s) and Release Date(s):

  • v0.1.0 (11.03.2025), Spring25 meta-release
  • v0.2.0 (19.09.2025), Fall25 meta-release

API availability: Information which APIs are available in which country and network, and how to get access can be found on the GSMA public launch status page.

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