Can voice biometrics help banks restore consumer faith?

This survey from Avaya and Sabio caught my eye recently as it shows how concerned consumers are about data privacy and security. And it is an unfortunate fact that financial institutions are the ones that consumers trust less with their personal information. Essentially, the survey shows that

(1)  customers feel that giving a call centre operator their card details is less secure than entering a PIN or using a voice biometric tool. In other words customers feel that an automated process is more secure than one involving a human being;

(2)  banks are more likely to suffer a data breach than MNOs or retailers and consumers don’t like cumbersome security processes where there are too many questions or the process is not integrated.

I think that a solution here is around an automated pre-authentication, which is far more secure and customer friendly than an operator based authentication model. Such automated pre-authentication model could be underpinned by voice biometrics, which is now a mature technology, very effective and easy to use. Even if there is a data breach from within the bank (not necessarily through the call centre), the very use of voice biometrics on the call-centre channel (and/or other channels) prevent the use of the breached identity data by fraudsters.

Voice Biometrics offers many advantages including the ones below:

1. It removes the human operator from the authentication process
2. It prevents the information obtained through data breaches from being used
3. It removes the need for complex passwords and PINs
4. When properly integrated, it can remove the need to duplicate the authentication process.

What the security industry can do is make it very difficult for fraudsters to actually use the stolen data to access bank accounts. This ensures that a complex security model can be implemented, with low/no friction resulting in high ease-of-use for the consumer/bank customer, and engendering confidence and trust in technology. Security is not an end point solution – consumers agree!