Tom Harwood, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Aeriandi talks about the challenges facing contact centres when authenticating payments and how voice biometrics is being used to fight crime. Voice biometrics offer more than simply security, he argues.
Financial fraud is rife. Only this week supermarket giant Tesco has suspended parts of its online banking after discovering suspicious transactions on 40,000 accounts. It is being reported as the largest cyber crime to involve a retail bank on record and has left Tesco counting the cost financially and in terms of its reputation too. Most security professionals work on the basis that nothing is entirely safe. If there’s enough of a motive, someone somewhere will find a way in. However, there are varying degrees of safety. And that’s an important point. All contact centres have security measures in place. However, not all contact centres have the same security measures in place. They can vary significantly. And this is where ‘degrees of security’ count.
Web based security measures have evolved much faster than those for voice and telephone in recent years. For web there’s always the option of multi-factor authentication. There’s also behavioural monitoring as a preventative measure and identity based management all improving degrees of data security. The same is just not true however for phone-based contact, which is still a poor relation to online. Therefore, telephone agents in the contact centre are becoming more of a target for fraudsters looking for a way to exploit weak telephone security measures.
We all expect that, on calling a contact centre, we’re asked some basic identity-based questions. Name, postcode, date of birth. Once these have been answered we gain total access to an account. So, it should go without saying that the same applies to a criminal. And let’s face it. Many of the answers are readily available on the internet. Telephone fraud is also a low risk, low cost way for criminals to exploit vulnerabilities. It is easy to carry out from any location and often untraceable. The rudimentary technology-based security that can sometimes be in place such as caller ID and Automatic Number Identification (ANI) can also be easily fooled using simple spoofing technology, making the chances of being caught extremely low.
For this reason it is estimated that between 30pc to 50pc of all fraud incidents are initiated with a phone call, meaning telephone agents in contact centres are particularly vulnerable to social engineering and manipulation. Furthermore, the average contact centre agent will only be dealing with a fraudster once in approximately every 2000 calls, meaning that identifying and handling them is not a core competency for most. Because of this, a growing number of businesses are looking at innovative new technology-based solutions such as voice biometrics in order to protect their contact centre agents and prevent fraud.
What voice biometrics offers that other security measures can’t?
Voice biometrics is so effective because, research shows over 95 per cent of fraudulent call attempts are repeat attempts by the same group of organised criminals. This has allowed authorities around the world to build up a global database of known fraudsters and their voice signatures. A voice biometrics solution will compare all callers against this database and quickly identify fraudsters. In these instances, it doesn’t matter how skilled a fraudster is at social engineering or manipulation, the agent will be immediately notified so they can quarantine the perpetrator from any sensitive information. An additional benefit is that the entire biometric process is completely transparent, meaning callers will not even know biometric verification is taking place unless an issue is raised with caller authenticity.
Voice biometrics can also be combined with additional security measures such as intelligent fraud detection to catch criminals who may not be in the global voice database yet. Intelligent fraud detection scores all calls against key risk factors such as audio characteristics, geo-location and phone number reputation. Within the first 30 seconds of a call, the agent receives an on-screen notification displaying the call’s overall risk score, along with custom instructions for how to further authenticate the call as necessary. Combining several technology based fraud detection systems in order to create the widest possible protection net is by far the best way to ensure customers and their data remain safely under lock and key, away from criminal hands.
As well as tightening security, voice biometric systems can now be used to improve the customer experience and cut call-handling times. Businesses are beginning to quickly build up their own database of genuine customer voice signatures meaning that when a customer calls in, they can be instantly identified without having to answer identity-based questions. This saves both time and money.
Online security has been the benefactor of a many of significant security improvements in recent years. However, telephone security still lags dangerously behind. It’s a sad fact that until this is addressed, it turns telephone agents in call centres into prime targets for professional fraudsters. However, the introduction of an effective voice biometrics system, ideally alongside additional measures such as intelligent fraud detection will bolster any business’s telephone identity and verification security whilst simultaneously improving the customer journey. It’s a step in the right direction.
