Contact Centers are the grown-ups-in-the-room among channels for establishing conversations between brands and their customers. Likewise, telcos are the most mature providers of communications services, devices and accessories to billions of mobile and residential customers around the world. Put them both together and you expose an extremely attractive fraud vector for hundreds (or thousands) of prospective imposters who perceive opportunities to establish new accounts under false pretenses. It is also ripe for biometrics-based fraud prevention.

Fighting this “new account fraud” is the target of a new product offering from ID R&D. Its stock-in-trade is biometric-based, conversational authentication, fraud reduction and liveness detection. Its new offer, IDFraud™ Contact Center, employs text-independent voice biometrics technologies to compare the voice of a new caller against a database of voiceprints from known fraudsters. By employing neural network-based technologies, it isolates speaker voices into separate audio files and then performs rapid comparison of the unique aspects of those voices to voiceprints of known fraudsters. The solution has been in service at a major telco since February 2020, where it took roughly one month to integrate the system into existing contact center infrastructure.

IDFraud Contact Center will compete against voice biometrics and AI-infused anti-fraud offerings from Pindrop, Nice, Nuance and dozens of firms with a full or partial suite of Intelligent Authentication (IAuth) solutions. Thus far, most of the traction for IAuth technologies has been among large banks and financial services companies. Telcos are next, as ID R&D’s offer confirms. Healthcare providers and government agencies are waiting in the wings, but the real growth should come with the growth in the need for low-effort authentication and fraud avoidance for eCommerce providers, through intelligent endpoints like smartphones, smart speakers, automobile consoles and shared kiosks.

The marketscape is like the Wild West today. To help companies understand their options and identify potential solution providers, Opus Research is preparing a comprehensive report and “Intelliview” specifically about IAuth. We’re conducting the basic research now and look forward to the opportunity to define the full stack of solutions, identify trends and assist in vendor identification.

Categories: Intelligent Authentication