Following an earlier venture into voice biometrics in 2009, Barclays’ has implemented the first passive voice biometrics solution for its Premier banking customers. The system enables staff to verify the customer without the normal authentication questions, or reliance on staffs personal knowledge of the caller themselves.
Customers of Barclays that we have heard from have highlighted the absolute simplicity and comfort they have in the security advantages of voice verification. An interesting aspect to the security system is that it is largely invisible to the caller, creating an almost seamless customer experience.
These passive systems will become an increasingly dominant form of authentication management but complementing rather than fully replacing the more active IVR based verification. These IVR solutions have progressed significantly over the past 12 months and open up the customers’ access to self-service as well as completely removing any need for security management at the agent desktop.
The Barclays system takes less than a minute of agent and customer conversation to verify, or roughly 30 seconds of customer speech (some commentary here). IVR systems, on the other hand, can verify the customer in seconds, literally only using an identification step in some designs leaving no security processes for the banker to undertake other than deal with the enquiry.
We expect Barclays will be investigating a wider rollout to its personal customer base in 2013, although we also understand the significantly different workflow implications of a mass market system so watch this space. We’re excited about the future of voice biometrics and looking forward to more innovation in 2013, extending from the successful text dependent solutions into passive and text independent solutions – all with positive CX and staff outcomes!
While there has been very little PR on the deployment some recent information from Barclay’s has been shared here.
About Flare Design: Flare are leaders in voice biometric customer experience and business process design. We bring a complete end-to-end view of the impacts, pitfalls and mitigating strategies of voice biometric implementations, change and the impact on staff. In the last 3 years, we have been fortunate to work on half a dozen voice biometrics deployments for large Financial businesses and Government.
