Instead, the newly announced NICE Real-Time Authentication solution can validate customers as they conduct a conversation with an agent, using their voice as a unique identifier, all without PINs, passwords, or key phrases to remember.

NICE Real-Time Authentication is already being used by several large financial institutions across the globe, handling millions of calls with high availability and large-scale capacity. The solution authenticates legitimate customers as well as identifies known fraudsters.

In an industry first, NICE's patent-pending Seamless™ Passive Enrollment process leverages a customer's previous call recordings to create a voice print to automatically confirm the caller's identity.

"Most voice-based projects have failed because they put a burden on the customer to set up their voice-enabled profiles in advance - an additional time-consuming task," said Yochai Rozenblat, President of the NICE Enterprise Group. "With NICE's Seamless Passive Enrollment, if a customer has called before, they can be automatically authenticated using their voice the very next time they call."

"Customers today are tired of having to jump through hoops when contacting their service providers," said Dan Miller, Senior Analyst at Opus Research. "Multi-layered, knowledge-based authentication processes have become increasingly complex, leading to many legitimate customers failing authentication on their own accounts."

Within days of one deployment, the NICE solution was able to authenticate thousands of customers with its passive enrollment technology. It had a greater than 90 percent verification rate and garnered high satisfaction among service agents.

Reducing "Time to Authenticate" by 75 Percent

According to analyst firm Contact Babel, most call centers currently take up to 60 seconds to verify the identity of a customer. The NICE solution automatically authenticates the caller in less than 15 seconds.

"A 45-second reduction in call handle time candle time can mean millions of dollars in annual savings for a large call center," said Rozenblat.

The authentication process is further strengthened by combining voice biometrics with a customer's interaction history. For instance, when a customer is not yet enrolled in the database, agents are guided to ask questions based on the customer's account activity and not the standard questions such as the name of their favorite pet.

Fighting Fraud

The solution also complements NICE's Contact Center Fraud Prevention offering and combines with NICE Actimize's Remote Banking fraud solutions which have been protecting many of the world's premier banks for years. Together, these solutions provide cross-channel fraud protection across all remote banking channels, including phone, web and mobile - to reduce fraud losses and protect legitimate customers without creating service hurdles.

Solution Capabilities

The solution can work in any industry where speed and efficiency are crucial to the customer experience. NICE Real-Time Authentication can be used with various call center recording systems. The solution includes:

Voice biometrics - The solution uses voice print matching to enroll callers and later match them with their own stored voice print for reliable speaker verification in real time.
NICE Seamless™ Passive Enrollment - Patent-pending process for leveraging previous customer interaction recordings, whereby callers are automatically enrolled into a voice print database.
Real-time agent guidance - Agents are notified of high-risk interactions in which the customer's claimed identity does not match the voice print database and then receive desktop guidance on what action should be taken.
Enterprise-ready scalability - The solution includes scalable streaming on all contact center interactions in real time, which enables organizations to support millions of interactions at minimal cost.
Dynamic Security Questions (DSQ) Interface - A second layer of authentication is used on top of the voice biometrics analysis layer to manage non-enrolled callers and authentication anomalies.
Authentication Center - A single application is used to manage the call authentication policy as well as report on and continuously analyze system performance.