Verint Enters Voice Biometrics Market with Victrio Acquisition
Adding to its predictive analytics business, Verint Systems has agreed to acquire Victrio, a provider of fraud prevention and identity authentication solutions.
While Verint is well-known for analytics and workforce optimization solutions, it believes there is a lot of synergy with Victrio, which gives Verint a footprint in the world of identity, authentication, and risk capability.
"We're now growing the fraud and risk analytics area of our business," says Ryan Hollenbeck, senior vice president of marketing at Verint. "While we do things around fraud, like video and ATM machines and desktop and process analytics, we didn't have anything in the way of voice biometrics that can help do predictive analysis with callers, especially in the financial services area."
According to Nancy Treaster, senior vice president and general manager at Verint, the company looked long and hard to find a partner in this area. Victrio, she says, "has a level of success in this space that's beyond just technology. Voice biometrics has been around for a long time, but cracking the code so that it doesn't create more work than it's worth, this is what Victrio brings to the table."
Victrio solutions combine passive voice biometrics with unique predictive analysis that can detect fraudsters and authenticate customers without caller interruption. The company’s solution listens to calls in the contact center, passively creates a voiceprint of the caller based on the content of the telephone interaction, and compares that voiceprint against a database of known fraudsters.
"Looking at a voiceprint by itself is OK, but it's not as accurate and creates too many false positives for a fraud department to be able to easily manage," Treaster says. "Victrio adds a lot of metadata to the mix, and they have the ability to much more accurately predict which calls are actually fraudulent."
Treaster says Victrio’s solutions use the blacklist identity authentication process, which compares callers to a fraudster database. The company’s technology also employs whitelist processes that compare voiceprints to already known customers. If the solution can't identify a caller from either list, metadata is added and an agent might be advised in real time to ask security questions.
Victrio's technology uses passive enrollment, where the voiceprint is collected without the caller's knowledge, pulling voice elements from the normal call center conversation. This differs from active enrollment, in which a customer is asked to repeat words, phrases, or number sequences to compile a voiceprint.
"It's sometimes hard to get customers to actively enroll and provide voiceprints, so passive enrollment is the new big thing," Treaster says.
Legal issues surrounding the notification of callers that their voiceprints are being collected and stored can be addressed by an automated message that them the call could be monitored or recorded for quality and security purposes, according to Treaster.
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