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National Australia Bank Launches Customer-Facing Voice Biometric Service

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Australia continues to be a hotbed for the latest in voice biometrics announcements. In another widely rumored deployment, National Australia Bank (NAB) has officially launched a voice verification service, making it available to the company’s 3.3 million personal banking customers.

Aimed at “delivering enhanced customer experience and security,” the public deployment comes after NAB ran a successful internal pilot involving 2,000 branch staff in May. The voice biometrics-based service is part of a multi-million dollar effort to upgrade a range of new security functions available to NAB personal banking customers.

According to a company statement, “With identity theft related fraud increasingly moving to the phone channel, the use of voice biometrics enables the effective identification, authentication and verification of customers, offering an extra layer of protection,” said Warren Shaw, executive general manager with NAB Personal Banking.

Successful authentication pilot programs have longed been rumored for financial services organizations, but NAB’s official launch marks the first bank – both in Australia and globally – to go public with a large-scale, customer-facing service. More to come…

Aviva Launches Voice Biometric Capability

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Speaking at last month’s Voice Leadership Forum in Sydney, Australia, Paul Magee, managing director with Salmat VeCommerce, predicted “an insurance company and bank are going live with its biometrics technology in the next few weeks.”

True to MaGee’s word, Australian life insurance and wealth management provider Aviva today announced the deployment of a voice biometric service to expedite the process of routing customers to appropriate resources over the phone. Utilizing Salmat VeCommerce’s VeSecure service, callers to Aviva can be quickly verified in order to access all insurance, investment and superannuation products. Enrollment to the service takes approximately two minutes, but Aviva guarantees “subsequent calls will be a faster and better experience.”

In a statement, Frank Lombardo, Group Director Operations at Aviva said, “Voice biometrics is yet another way in which Aviva is improving [customer] experience for both our customers and financial planners.”

Aviva has set up a website page to address frequently asked questions about the voice verification system and includes a prominent mention on the company’s home page.

Aviva Australia, combined with funds management arm Aviva Investors, manages or administers more than AUD$19.2 billion in funds for more than 350,000 customers. Both are part of the global Aviva group, the world’s fifth largest insurance group.

Genesys’ UC-Connect Debuts Today

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Genesys has formally launched UC-Connect, a software suite that tightly links Genesys branded Customer Interaction Management (CIM) resources with IBM SameTime, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Siemens OpenScape and parent company Alcatel-Lucent’s MyInstant Communicator.

Microsoft’s Bing: Branded Search Extends to Free DA

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Monday also marked a much lower key launch for a rebranded (and renumbered) free automated Directory Assistance service, Bing 411. Details on the revamped service can be found here. There are many similarities between Bing411 and the erstwhile “Live Search 411” (which was accessed through the toll-free number 800-CALL411/800-225-5411) which, in turn, had leveraged much of the heavy lifting and automated speech application development that Tellme Networks had undertaken over the past five years or so. Yet there are many noteworthy, incremental and evolutionary improvements.

Centrelink Unveils Voice Authentication System

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In a widely anticipated deployment, Australian social services agency Centrelink has officially launched a biometric speaker verification system used to authenticate customer access to welfare services. The $2 million system has been in development for more than two years, including a pilot program for students and families, and is now available to up to 60,000 Centrelink customers.

Because customers were having trouble remembering passwords for phone access, speaker verification was implemented as “the only thing that might work beyond a PIN,” said Ross Summerfield, Project Manager with Centrelink. Additionally, the voice self-service system frees up Centrelink to handle more complex cases and hopes to improve staff efficiency in handling some 28 million calls per year.

While the opt-in system is initially targeting “customers without complex lodging requirements and who may need to routinely update simple information,” Summerfield says they have no intention of rolling it out to all Centrelink customers. To recruit the initial customers, employees have been actively calling and inviting prospective users.

Summerfield says enrollment takes about five minutes, with a customer repeating an access number three times, their name twice and counting “1 to 9” a minimum of two times. Once authenticated, the user has access to all telephone self-service offerings.

Telecommunications provider Telstra has managed the service delivery, while KAZ provided project management for connecting the system components to Centrelink’s security services. As well, KAZ built dual, text-independent speaker verification engines, with Nuance providing an additional text-dependent engine.

Though the program is only officially available to Centrelink customers this week, Summerfield said measurements during the 2007-2008 pilot showed that 90% of callers would prefer to use speaker verification over a PIN, with 95% finding the system friendly and easy to use and 98% saying they would use it the next time they accessed Centrelink.