At the moment, the status quo involves using authentication processes which help to mitigate consumer fraud, such as entering a PIN or answering questions. However, many of these measures can be circumvented by fraudsters with access to leaked or hacked data sources.
Increasingly, leading financial services institutions are combining the next level of authentication with an ecosystem approach to their security to push back against fraudsters.
Here are three developments contact centre and security professionals need to be investigating today.
1. Voice biometrics
Voice biometrics play a crucial role, not only in the contact centre, but in defence against consumer fraud generally.
Ian McGuire, Security and Biometrics Specialist at voice biometrics specialists, Nuance, sees that voice biometrics are reaching maturity. They’re now used to authenticate genuine customers, identify abnormal customer behaviour and keep track of known fraudsters.
Nuance is already using its voice biometrics expertise to help major banks identify and maintain watchlists of known fraudsters. The company's technology can also identify 'synthetic voices' that may have been generated using deepfake technology, representing an important challenge to one of the most worrying new attack vectors available to fraudsters.
Voice biometrics are also extremely useful in the development of frictionless authentication processes. Nuance's technology can help institutions authenticate based on freeform conversations, with clear benefits for the customer experience. Removing the need for callers to say a specific phrase, speeds up authentication by wrapping it up in the natural conversation.
2. Continuous authentication
Our own innovation teams are developing highly advanced authentication solutions based on the latest developments in biometrics, identity and cryptography – with a particular focus on continuous authentication as a defence.
We’re exploring inherent, consistent security factors such as a user's face, and the ways authentication can use these factors in sensitive working environments. For example, if a solution continuously analyses the face and surroundings of the person sitting at a computer workstation, it’s then able to generate alerts and take specified action in the event that something changes. As a result, the solution can block access to certain resource, or can lock the workstation altogether if it stops recognising the face of the person in front of it.
Continuous authentication is clearly an important focus for the security community, and its technologies will soon find uses in consumers' daily lives. We’ve already filed patents in the continuous authentication arena, including mood-based policy enforcement, smart home control and context-dependent access.
3. Security ecosystems
Building a modern security architecture can be challenging for financial services institutions. They need to find a way to navigate through issues of interoperability, problems associated with legacy systems and a lack of in-house expertise.
What can make this process even more complex is contracting with multiple vendors, and then making sure their solutions play well together. It can be a hugely time consuming and resource-intensive task, and it can involve significant compromises.
Our security platform has been designed to solve this problem. We can help financial services institutions to manage and control fraud and risk across their whole organisation, providing access to the most up-to-date thinking and technology from a diverse global security ecosystem through a single point of access.
We’re already helping the world's largest financial services institutions protect themselves and their customers.
Download our whitepaper, ‘Ecosystem thinking: the fraud and risk approach that protects from every angle’ to find out more about how we can help you secure your organisation.
