Telstra, Salmat give voice to NAB biometric security system

Peter Dinham
Monday, 22 June 2009 14:25

Business IT - Technology

A voice biometric system giving National Australia Bank customers enhanced security with their telephone banking has now been fully deployed by Telstra and Salmat working together using Salmat’s VeSecure  solution.

As first reported by iTWire two weeks ago, the Salmat solution uses voice biometrics as an alternative to PINs to authenticate customers for telephone banking.   

As we reported in iTWire previously, the Salmat  voice security system is available to NAB’s 3.3 million personal banking customers following a month long internal pilot with 2,000 branch staff during May.

The new speech security service enables customers calling NAB’s customer contact centre to register their voice pattern and use this for authentication on subsequent calls, enhancing security and removing the need for customers to remember PINs and passwords.

Telstra led the sale and implementation of VeSecure as part of the bank’s ongoing customer service initiative, following the deployment of Salmat’s VeConnect at the bank earlier this year which Salmat says enhances the routing of telephone banking calls and the launch of a single telephone number (136 NAB) to cover all of the bank’s customer enquiries.

NAB personal banking program manager, direct channels speech program, Sam Jackel, said today NAB was always looking for ways to improve customer experience and “deliver the highest levels of security,” and he added, “our objective is to provide customers with a more convenient, faster and easy-to-use telephone banking experience while simultaneously improving identity security.”

Telstra enterprise & government general manager for financial services, Rocky Scopelliti, said the introduction of speech recognition and voice biometric technology at NAB had set an Australian benchmark for customer service in the banking industry.

“Raising the bar on the customer service experience is the key to driving business growth. Telstra has long been an advocate of speech technologies as it improves the way in which people and organisations work. This solution boosts productivity, whilst fundamentally addressing the inherent concerns of fraud. We are confident that NAB’s employees and customers will realise the significant benefits of this unique service from the outset.” Mr Scopelliti said. 

Jackel said NAB selected Telstra and VeCommerce as a result of their proven track record in delivering speech-enabled solutions. He said Telstra had managed the coordination and deployment of the solution and its integration into NAB’s existing telephony infrastructure, utilising  Nuance’s Verifier engine as a component of VeSecure.