Solution: auto baud rate was in fact not enabled; I had my internal M95 baud rate set to 115200, my Arduino solution was also set to 115200 baud. However, SoftwareSerial seems to fail for rates over 9600-ish. Once I reset M95 internal rate to auto baud and changed my Arduino code to 9600 characters came through as expected.
Thanks for the feedback it drove me to find the solution myself.
Thanks!