Article by: Tom Harwood, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder at Aeriandi
“As it stands, it is estimated that between 30 percent to 50 percent of all fraud incidents are initiated with a phone call, meaning telephone agents in contact centres are particularly vulnerable to social engineering and manipulation. Web-based security measures have evolved much faster than those for voice and telephone in recent years. For the 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 not true however for phone-based contact, which is still a poor relation to online.
Voice is an area where biometric security will thrive in 2018. Research shows over 95 percent 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 immediately be 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.
In 2018, we will see more contact centres combining voice biometrics with fraud detection. Fraud detection on voice looks at more than the voice print of the user; it considers a whole host of other parameters. For example, is the phone number being used a legitimate one? Is it a number associated with organised crime? Increasing phone fraud attacks on UK banks come from overseas. Voice fraud technology has been proven to protect against this as well as domestic threats.
Recent advancements in biometrics technology have been widely shown to significantly reduce fraud, but biometrics alone is not the whole solution. No security technology is 100 percent fool-proof. Like any security measure, voice biometrics works best when combined with a range of other security processes. Intelligent fraud detection needs to be utilised so that criminals who may not yet have been flagged on the global database can still be identified. Intelligent fraud detection notifies the call centre agent of the call’s overall risk score. It does this by scoring all calls against a number of key risk factors such as audio characteristics, geo-location, number reputation and frequency of calls. Within the first 30 seconds, the agent will receive the risk score and a set of custom instructions on how to further authenticate the call.
Combining several different technology-based fraud detection systems, instead of relying on outdated security questions for authentication, creates the widest possible protection for customers and their data. 2018 will see a widespread introduction of effective voice biometrics systems, ideally alongside additional measures such as intelligent fraud detection. This will bolster telephone identity and verification security, whilst simultaneously improving the customer journey. It may not solve the issue completely, but it will be a step in the right direction in 2018.”
