Brett Beranek, Vice President of Security and Biometrics at Nuance Communications, tells us about the importance of voice biometrics for customers and businesses in the fight against fraud.
What are the main fraud risks faced by companies today?
Today, the risk of fraud comes in many different forms, not just for consumers but also businesses. Criminals are becoming more sophisticated in the way they operate and often work in organised groups to make their work more difficult to trace.
For example, when part of a criminal organisation has made a large value payment in a store, often it has been discovered that another member of the organisation has made a fraudulent phone call earlier on in the process to cash out elsewhere.
Clearly, companies need to wise up to how criminals operate and one way to do this is by investing in technologies such as biometrics to ensure that the risk of attack is minimised.
How important is the development of voice biometrics for customers and business in relation to fraud prevention?
Consumers and businesses continue to see password protection as a vital part of daily life. Given this legacy loyalty, it is important to educate and inform people on why PINs and passwords shouldn’t be the only form of protection that is required.
Instead, enterprises should be protecting their customers through the use of tools such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technologies, including voice and behavioural biometrics, as well as conversational and device-focused algorithms.
This multi-layer approach provides the highest levels of security since it can identify legitimate customers through the sound of their voice, location, device and the way they talk, tap and type.
Through conversational analysis, voice characteristics and other aspects of communication, the technology can flag when a call is likely to be fraudulent and identify offenders whose profiles do not match those of a customer.
For example, HSBC recently revealed that voice biometrics has prevented over £300 million falling into the hands of criminals since it launched in the UK.
How does the use of voice biometrics effect customer experience?
Remembering all the passwords that we have in our lives can be a challenging task for even the most organised consumer. According to Nuance, two fifths of UK customers forget their passwords at least once a month, with a quarter calling a contact centre around once every three months to reset login credentials following this issue.
Voice biometrics helps with at least one aspect of the process by ensuring telephone banking is safer, quicker and easier than having to remember yet another password.
For example, Barclays Wealth have achieved a score of 90% or higher with 93% of their customers following the deployment of voice biometrics. A total of 97% of clients that have been offered the voice biometrics service have decided to use it as their means of identity verification, leading to a 60% reduction in customer complaints and 60% shorter calls.
How are virtual assistants changing the customer experience, for example within call centres?
To deliver the 24/7 experience consistently across phone, mobile applications, digital assistants or web chat, many organisations are adopting AI-enabled virtual assistants (VAs).
As an example of this, Swedbank Group – a leading financial institution in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – deployed a VA that uses natural language understanding to understand customer intent and deliver a human-like, conversational responses through interactive, text-based chat.
With 75% of Swedbank customers preferring to conduct their banking via a mobile app or online, the deployment has been a huge hit. The bank saw an average of 30,000 conversations taking place per month within the first three months of adoption and the assistant answering eight out of every 10-customer questions – and is getting better the more as it learns.
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