The largest financial institution in Canada has determined that the time has come to make passive voice-based authentication available to its 18 million clients. As reported in the Technology and Science section of the CBCnews web site, RBC had been operating a pilot during the past summer and determined that passive voice authentication, supported by Nuance Communications FreeSpeech text-independent technology, was well-liked by callers (the initial pilot consisted of clients who were  those that were calling for support of online banking services).

So far, the decision to “go-ahead” has been validated by the fact that well-over 90% of callers given the opportunity to “opt-in” for the service have elected to do so. The value proposition is straighforward. Customers no longer have to input a PIN or password; nor do they have to answer a series of “challenge questions” to begin to carry out their banking tasks.

Instead, callers identify themselves by providing their debit card numbers (or at least the last four digits). Then they are authenticated in the background, in the course of a conversation, based on the strength of a match with a stored voice template. The template, incidentally, is created during an enrollment process that is also a conversation between a client and a live bank advisor. After investigating options, RBC determined that they wanted to use live conversations to create the templates. An alternative may have been to transform voice recordings into templates, but that was deemed to be a violation of bank disclosure policies if not governmental regulation surrounding informed consent.

RBC calls it “conversational voice biometrics” and considers it a “Canadian first.” Readers will recall that cross-town rival Manulife claimed a “first” with the introduction of its voice-based authentication service a few days ago. The salient difference is that Manulife’s offering (also based on Nuance technology, but this time VocalPassword) requires clients to say a specific passphrase and requires an enrollment process that is not “conversational.” Both enrollment and authentication are customarily more time-consuming for text-dependent solutions.

Both RBC and Nuance expect client reaction to be quite positive. RBC has allocated a few months for the enrollment process to come to fruition and for the system to operate at scale. Given that RBC has 18 million customers around the world, this is a significant development and marks a strong vote of confidence for the underlying technology and the perceived power of passive authentication. Momentum is building.

Categories: Intelligent Authentication

Tags: Voice biometrics, authentication, Nuance Communications, Bank security, Secure CX