Financial services companies are living up to their leadership role in terms of implementing leading-edge client authentication. Investec, a “specialist bank and asset manager” serving clients in the UK and Australia as well as South Africa, is replacing an authentication system that depended on PINs, passwords or challenge questions with a passive system that affirms callers’ identities passively, as they carry on a conversation with their financial advisers.

The core authentication engine is Nuance’s FreeSpeech Biometric Solution which was integrated into Investec’s customer care and security systems by South African voice biometric integration specialist OneVault. It is a “first” for any financial services company in South Africa and, if past is prologue, signals heightened interest and accelerated deployments among a larger community of commercial banks, insurance companies and even government agencies with an interest in providing secure, simple authentication of clients, pensioners and citizens.

Investec’s approach strongly resembles that implemented in mid-2013 by Barclays Wealth. Based on a presentation delivered at VBC-London 2014 by Barclays executive Anne Grim, the system fulfilled the bank’s expectation for increased customer satsifaction and had the added benefit of increasing employee satisfaction and retention. Her belief is that relieving financial advisers of the responsibility of authenticating their best clients led to shorter call durations, higher satisfaction levels, lower absenteeism and longer employee retention rates.

Barclays’ results were also incorporated in a Webinar that incorporated the results of Opus Research’s Survey of Best Practices for Voice Biometrics in the Enterprise. They included other positive performance measures associated with the introduction of passive voice authentication, including an enrollment rate of 80% of regular callers and customer acceptance rates (among enrolled callers) of 97%. You can view a replay of the Webinar here.

In the coming year, Opus Research expects a ripple effect to take hold as we learn more about the benefits of passive authentication both inside and outside of the financial services community.

Categories: Intelligent Authentication

Tags: Voice biometrics, authentication, Financial Services, Investec