NICE Systems has stepped up the marketing efforts surrounding its suite of Real-Time Authentication solutions by formally announcing that it is “already being used by several large financial institutions across the globe, handling millions of calls with high availability and large-scale capacity.” More importantly, it has broadened the product suite by using a “Seamless™ Passive Enrollment process” that leverages previous call recordings to create voiceprints that can be used to confirm each caller’s identity in the background during a call into a company’s contact center.

At Voice Biometrics Conference-San Francisco next week, Elad Hoffman, Solution Manager at NICE Systems, will describe how Seamless™ Passive Enrollment is being implemented by a leading European bank in a session called “Passive Enrollment Takes Off.” Elad will describe the revolutionary aspects of both passive enrollment and real-time authentication. He’ll be able to describe how the former obviates the need for banks or financial institutions to prompt customers through a process that takes a few minutes (even in the ideal) and, in some cases, has caused customers to question why they need to repeat the same phrase three times. The latter has proven the value of using business rules and speech analytics in real time to provide an ongoing score of the risk that the individual on the other side of the phone line is a criminal.

A third element of the solution is the Contact Center Fraud Prevention solution suite built on the NICE Actimize product set. Together they comprise a layered approach to fraud reduction that includes enrollment and creation of voiceprints leverageing existing call recordings and passive voice biometric-based authentication to complement existing resources that screen contact center interactions to identify fraud and then help agents take the appropriate actions while in a conversation with a known fraudster. The solution also leverages the text-independent voice biometric engine from Nuance Communications.

This type of product is yet another example of technologies that help a business achieve internally generated key performance measures (KPIs). They stop fraud, speed up call handling times and leverage existing resources while, at the same time, creating a better experience for customers at potentially massive scale. For readers who wonder why this hasn’t taken off sooner and whether there are barriers to broad adoption. Part of the answer has to do with differing interpretations surrounding the handling of call recordings. At a minimum, financial institutions will have to change the preamble to each call. It is well-known that “This call is being recorded” has become a ubiquitous announcement in the course of calls to financial services contact centers. Indeed, every second of every call is subject to recording and some sort of analytic interpretation to make sure that it complies to industry requirements.

A new wrinkle happens when multiple recordings are used to generate a voice biometric template. At a minimum the preamble must be changed. In the past the announcement has said “This call is being recorded for training purposes” or “This call is being recorded to comply with the law.” Staying on the line after hearing the preamble is a form of consent. Federal laws surrounding privacy in many European countries require that storage of information be “purpose driven” and that those purposes be made explicit in order of an individual to give consent. In similar instances, firms that record calls with customers have found that it is sufficient to notify callers that the call is being recorded and then provide details in printed material or disclosures on Web sites. A consensus is building that it is mandatory to tell a caller that a conversation is being recorded as part of efforts to provide evidence of a transaction that is non-refutable.

Other details, like how long a recording is stored, with whom it may be shared, and whether it may be distilled into a voiceprint or template, can be spelled out in contractual statement using another channel. In the U.S., such laws and conditions vary from state to state. There is uneven enforcement in Europe as well. That said, it is always a best practice to err on the side of greater disclosure and gaining customer consent.

Categories: Intelligent Authentication, Articles

Tags: Voice biometrics, Contact Centers