"Companies in the finance area have the greatest opportunity to automate. They know they must increase customer service without breaking the bank, particularly in light of competitive pressures to keep costs down," states Nancy Jamison, principal analyst at Jamison Consulting. "Banks' need for supportability and reliability means that a fully supported application and platform is of particular interest to them. Their aspiration to provide 24-hour customer service in order to both help and retain customers was the driver behind touch-tone automated systems. With Edify's move to a fully supported speech application, banks can realize significant cost savings with a far better user experience."

Based on industry standards such as VoiceXML and SALT, the Edify Voice Banking application eliminates enterprise customer concerns over application functionality and compatibility issues. The Edify Voice Banking product includes key features such as account information and history, stop pay, change PIN, funds transfer, as well as business enterprise features, such as, detail reporting and monitoring for easy, ongoing technical support and upgrades.

With Edify Voice Banking, customers calling into the system can verbally identify themselves, their account, and their requests without having to traverse a complex touch-tone menu. Customers benefit from being able to interact with a friendly, conversational system that provides efficient access to the available banking information they might need.

"In an increasingly competitive marketplace and an environment of continuously changing regulations, banks don't have the time to custom develop a call center speech application from scratch to meet the growing demand for quality customer service," said Mitch Mandich, president and CEO of Edify. "Banks need a flexible application that enables fast time to market, improved customer satisfaction and retention, and true, realized cost savings. We've answered this critical need with a robust, licensed and fully-supported, packaged speech application that is quick to deploy and easy to use."

Edify Voice Banking brings together a proven software platform, application support, and voice services in conjunction with knowledgeable industry experts. As a result, Edify Voice Banking addresses the challenges confronted by financial institutions that want to, not only retain their customers, but ensure that up sell activities regularly take place. By offering enhanced customer interactivity with back-end compatibility, banks can now look to on-going, profitable relationships with their consumers.