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Voice biometrics touted for financial services firms

The financial services industry should consider voice biometrics as a more secure and convenient method of multi-factor authentication for phone or online banking..

Voice biometrics firm VeCommerce said this week that the case for voice biometrics is further strengthened with the recent introduction of an ISO global standard for deploying biometrics in financial services.

Brett Feldon, general manager for EMEA at VeCommerce, said: "Over a quarter of the UK population now regularly uses online banking but fraud continues to increase and criminals are becoming more sophisticated in their attacks.

"Over the past 12 months many financial institutions have rolled out card readers as a solution for providing second-factor authentication for online banking customers. But these have several drawbacks.

"Not only are they expensive to produce but they are costly to support with the continual loss of passwords and the actual readers. They also do not work 'out of band' and are vulnerable to 'man in the middle' attacks."

Voice biometrics provides multifactor authentication of an individual's identity through the unique properties of their voice.

A voice profile can be used to authenticate telephone and online transactions, and eliminates the need for remembering identifiers such as Pins and passwords.

"There is growing pressure on financial institutions to step up security due to the impact of anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism legislation, and financial institutions need to safeguard their own customers from the threat of fraud and minimise their own monetary losses," added Feldon.

"Voice biometrics is now a commercially viable technology and, with the new ISO 19092:2008 standard, banks now have an agreed framework and standards that they can use to implement the technology successfully."

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Comments: 1

I think this is a repeat of a previous article?

It is true that this would be a great method of authentication, and that it solves the problem of customers losing security tokens such as those offered by Verisign. However I am not too sure of the security implications. Recording someones voice is unobtrusive and relatively easy these days, and once it has been recorded you don't know you've lost it. The advantage of tokens is that you do know. So in many ways losing tokens is an advantage!
I should also mention that the tokens are now quite unobtrusive. The new one on offer is the size and thickness of a credit card. I haven't seen it myself but I hear it just fits into the wallet.
Another way of doing this "something you own" factor of authentication is via mobile phone SMS. That really is a good way as most people phones are with them all the time.
In short I would say voice has significant advantages, over the current system, and used in conjunction with say cookies would be pretty secure. However tokens also have advantages as explained above.
Lastly you have to look at the run out cost and how it effects you. A voice system would be high initial cost and low operating, and tokens low initial but higher operating (if your not charging customers for lost ones as would expect banks to do).