Voice biometrics: coming to a bank near you

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 08 March 2008 06:02

Your IT - Home IT

At a recent bankers' conference in the US, Australian speech application company VeCommerce presented delegates with a challenge: fool our voice biometric technology and win $US1000. No one did, vindicating the company's claim that the technology is robust enough to be deployed in multifactor authentication for applications such as online banking.

According to Steve Lewis, general manager business consulting for VeCommerce in Australia, while deployments of voice biometric technology have to date been fairly limited, that is set to change. "We are a the cusp of seeing some major deployments. We are in the process of developing a system for a top tier financial services organisation in Australia which will roll out at the end of this year. That will be a very large scale deployment...Two of the others are looking at similar solutions: once one goes the others will follow."

Lewis said the banks were interested particularly in applying the technology to Internet banking. "There is so much phishing going on that people are getting nervous about the security of their passwords. A number of banks secure now their transactions through SMS tokens - they send a one time password to your mobile phone. Our product allows the bank to generate a phone call to your mobile phone then it compares your voice to a stored profile."

VeCommerce suggests that a voice profile eliminates the need for remembering identifiers such as PINs, passwords, mother's maiden name, or for having special equipment such as PIN pads or fobs. Also, in situations where callers are required to identify themselves to a call centre operator, it avoids the caller having to provide information such as account number, date of birth, etc which could easily be stolen and used in subsequent identity fraud. CONTNUED