UK bank testing vocal biometric security
Barclays Wealth & Investment Management is using Nuance's FreeSpeech voice biometrics solution to automatically confirm and identify customers, instead of using security questions that rely on the customer's ability to remember a number of different details.
Security questions—often referred to as "knowledge-based authentication"—can be time-consuming and frustrating for customers that have to provide often hard-to-recall information on obscure topics.
Also, even when a customer is successful in answering all the necessary questions, if they call back a few minutes later, the process has to start all over again—a frustration Barclays is trying to tackle. Now, when a customer calls in to Barclays to access their account, they engage in a 20- to 30-second conversation with a customer service agent and during that time Nuance FreeSpeech is used to compare the customer's voice to their unique voiceprint on file.
