8×8 looks to boost PHL presence as customer experience space evolves

By Beatriz Marie D. Cruz, Reporter

CLOUD-BASED communications solutions provider 8×8, Inc. is looking to strengthen its presence in the Philippine market as increasing cyber threats drive the need for stronger customer experience (CX) and authentication tools.

“While the presence and penetration of CX tools is growing, the Philippine market is becoming more and more lucrative for attackers because it’s linked directly to financial assets,” Igor Mostovoy, product director of communications platform as a service (CPaaS) at 8×8, Inc., told ����ý in a virtual interview.

“We do see a tremendous shift in terms of enterprises looking for security solutions, but also with the Philippine government looking to strengthen security standards across the country.”

8×8 provides a cloud-based infrastructure and platform using application programming interfaces (API) that integrates real-time communications capabilities like short message services�� (SMS) and messaging apps into organizations’ applications, websites and workflows.

It helps with functions like authentication and fraud prevention, marketing and communications, and customer support.

8×8 is also looking to further expand its presence in the country through sectors like financial technology, banking, and insurance as these industries shift from traditional to omnichannel messaging formats.

“From the CX point of view, that means that customers are also becoming more sophisticated when it comes to CX tools. Before, you could just blast an SMS campaign, but now we are evolving towards behavioral targeting to enable more targeted campaigns,” Mr. Mostovoy said.

Last year, the company announced a partnership with US-based software company Descope to seamlessly integrate the latter’s drag-and-drop customer identity and access management platform into 8×8’s CPaaS API.

With Descope’s no-code and low-code visual workflows solution, 8×8 can help customize user journeys and build personalized onboarding experiences.

It can also help customers adopt modern login processes like social logins, passkeys, one-time passwords (OTPs), and magic links.

“If you look at breaches that happened recently in the Philippines and elsewhere, almost 99% of the breaches begin with a weak password that an attacker uses to gain initial access and they laterally move in the organization,” Descope Co-founder Dan Sarel told ����ý.

“I cannot stress enough: the defense against attacks starts with real and strong authentication,” he said. “You can spend millions of dollars on lots of firewalls and IPS (intrusion prevention system), but if you don’t know who the user on the other side really is, all these defenses are worthless.”

About 84.5% of Philippine organizations experienced cybersecurity breaches in 2024 due to gaps in third-party cyber risk management, according to cyber defense company BlueVoyant.