Verint Systems Inc., a global leader in contact center monitoring, recording, analytics and “enterprise intelligence”, has agreed to acquire voice-based fraud prevention specialist Victrio. Financial terms were not disclosed. To this point, Victrio had marketed its solutions as an independent company often in conjunction with Verint’s rival, NICE Systems.

Victrio’s efforts have landed a set of marquee customers that include one of the largest commercial banks in the world and a leading issuer of payment cards. Based on months of real world results, Victrio’s clients are finding that voice-based fraud reduction has measurable impact on fraud loss. As Mark Lazar, Victrio’s CEO, explained, “We’ve brought the ‘data science’ into the mix and proven that our solutions can work at scale.”

That message was not lost on Verint and many of its existing customers. Nancy Treaster, SVP and General Manager of Strategic Operations at Verint, explained that Verint has been responding to RFPs from its existing enterprise customers with the Victrio’s solution. In many cases it offers a packaged solution that merges Verint-based portfolio of contact center software with Victrio’s services to bring a complete, risk-based fraud prevention solution.

As part of Verint, Victrio will see a large number of opportunities to augment Verint’s line of Actionable Intelligence® products and services for its global installed base. The ties with Verint also bring Victrio ready access to the call recordings that are the raw material for the database of  voiceprints that are foundational to passive, predictive fraud detection. The respective sales teams will find themselves in front of new categories of decisionmakers, as well. Verint will find that its salespeople can take their message to top security and risk management executives who often pay short shrift to the problems that arise in contact centers; at the same time, Victrio will have a strong story to tell to the folks who want to limit their exposure to phone-based fraud without putting callers through time-consuming challenge-question-and-response rituals.

A silent winner in the acquisition is voice biometric engine provider Agnitio. It is the provider of the core voice biometric processing platform for Victrio’s solution. It also provides the speaker identification software that is a key component of Verint’s line of Security Intelligence solutions. Both Verint/Victrio and Agnitio will be present, as featured speakers and sponsors, at Voice Biometrics Conference-London (November 6-7).

Categories: Articles

Tags: speech analytics, Voice biometrics, Mergers and Acquisitions, Verint, financial fraud prevention, Victrio