We’re getting more local color on the companies that are teaming up to provide multi-factor authentication services that include voice biometrics. This week, cloud-based voice application service provider Angel announced that it is hosting the IVR elements of the voice biometric-based authentication service offered by LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Back in April, Kimberly Little, Director of Identity Authentication Solutions at LexisNexis, announced that her group would be adding voiceprint-based authentication to a set of ID-proofing solutions that already included biometric authentication in the form of fingerprints.
The announcement is important in two respects: LexisNexis Risk Solutions is one of the giants in reducing fraud in the insurance and financial services business. It is a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier, the Amsterdam-based publisher and information provider with more 30,000+ employees in more than 100 countries worldwide. It provides professional information solutions to the science and medical, legal, risk management, and business to business sectors primarily in North America and Europe. When you think of “Big Data,” Reed Elsevier (and LexisNexis) should be top-of-mind because of its history of aggregating and organizing raw data from a number of sources.
As LexisNexis Risk Solutions is profiled on its own Web site: The solutions it offers “combine proprietary, public and third-party information, analytics and advanced technology” and use the information to assist its corporate customers in evaluating, predicting and managing risk and improving operational effectiveness, predominantly in the US. It employs about 4,000 people and generated about $1.5 billion in revenues in the year ending December 2011.
For this giant in risk management (primarily for insurance companies) to incorporate voiceprints into its solution set is an important development. It will enable LexisNexis customers (like insurance companies or credit bureaus) to enable their clients to authenticate their identities with their voice in order to gain access to their information. Multi-factor ID-proofing is becoming especially important as the use of the Internet, World Wide Web, PCs, laptops, smartphones and tablets are becoming commonplace to gain access to sensitive information or initiate important transactions. With remote or distributed access becoming so frequent, the need for stronger authentication of the individuals using those devices is mandatory.
LexisNexis acknowledges that it is using multiple authentication protocols and factors, and has now elevated voice to the same status as fingerprints and one-time-passwords. Angel, which has offered hosted voice biometric services for a number of years, is a direct beneficiary. In this case, it is being called upon to provide the interactive voice response (IVR) resources needed to enroll participants and then to prompt callers to provide their spoken words to support voice biometric-based authentication. It is destined to give voice a higher profile among strong authentication alternatives.
Sensory, Inc., takes embedded speech processing another step forward by adding voice biometric-based speaker identification to its TrulyHandsfree(TM) voice activation technology. As a result, a wide variety of home and mobile electronic devices can be trained to “wake up” and respond to a specific person’s voice. For mobile professionals means higher levels of security when activating smartphones, laptops, desktops and tablets. There are equally important implications for owners and users of electronic devices in the home. As Sensory’s CEO Todd Mozer points out in this press release, the new software will make it possible to train a digital video player (or set-top box) to recognize the voice a specific viewers in order to recommend appropriate “favorites,” or block unsuitable programs.
As we’ve noted before, Sensory, Inc., has long been devoted to supporting TrulyHandsfree(TM) voice control of devices and media, especially in the automotive setting, where wake up words need to be distinguished from road noise or other random sounds in the background. Voice activation has been available on the Samsung Galaxy S2 for roughly a year now. In order to reduce the power consumption required to have the device constantly listening for its wake-up words, Sensory has made sure that the technology for the trigger words are “deeply embedded” in the devices hardware.
According to Mozer, the company “always had speaker verification on our chips.” However, to support the new offer, the company switched to a new HMM (hidden Markov model) based biometric engine in order to provide higher accuracy and lower false acceptance or false rejection rates. Sensory is demonstrating an alpha version of the system running on an Android device and using the passphrase “Hello Blue Genie”. Mozer trained the smartphone by repeating the phrase three times. Then he was able to unlock and activate the phone by saying the phrase, whereupon it said “Greetings Todd Mozer.” When i said the phrase after he had trained it, the phone woke up, but displayed the word “Rejected,” and I was unable to activate any of its features or services.
A beta version of the voice activation with speaker identification technology will be available under license from Sensory in the coming week. As the press release explains, details are available from info@sensoryinc.com
Voice Biometrics Conference New York City – April 3-4, 2012
Hyatt Regency Jersey City on the Hudson
Platinum Sponsors
Gold Sponsor
Event Sponsors
Agenda & Presentations
Top analysts, industry experts, implementers and vendors met in New York with keynote presentations and panel sessions discussing business opportunities, strategies and applications, deployment options, and what’s next for voice biometrics.
Wednesday, April 3, 2012
1:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
The Power of Positive Authentication – Opening remarks from Opus Research, taking stock of the past, present and future of voice biometric-based technolgoy and markets.
Speaker:
Dan Miller, Senior Analyst, Opus Research
View Presentation
1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Conversational Customer Care: Secure and Friendly – Contact centers are sites for large scale enrollments and high volume authenticated user. That’s why customer acceptance of voice biometric-based and multifactor authentication is so important. That acceptance will be driven by concern over security and encouraged by positive attitudes from prospective users.
Speakers:
Jenny Burr , Senior Manager, Professional Services, Convergys
Angel Grant, Senior Manager for Anti-Fraud Solutions, RSA
View Presentation
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Mobile Authentication: Applications and Use Cases – User authentication becomes vitally important as individuals call on their mobile devices (traditional phones, smartphones and tablets) to be their mobile assistant, commercial bank and universal communicator. Learn how voiceprints are, literally, the key to the kingdom.
Speakers:
Emilio Martinez, CEO, Agnitio
John Amein, Senior VP Product Management, Voxeo
Daniel Thornhill, VP of Product Development, ValidSoft
Chuck Buffum, President, Buffum Consulting (Moderator)
3:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. – Break
3:45 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Reality Check #1: Lessons Learned from Forensics and Law Enforcement – What can enterprise solutions learn from law enforcement deployments of voice biometrics? Voice as part of multi-factor authentication.
Speaker:
Alexey Khitrov, Strategic Development Director, Speech Technology Center
View Presentation
4:15 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Vanguard Case Study: Voice verification, “To be or not to be” – Vanguard went through an extensive analysis of voice biometrics technology and its readiness for production deployment. A business case with a cost benefit analysis was prepared to validate the feasibility of a voice biometrics technology-based solution for client contact center security. This was followed by rigorous evaluation of vendor products for infrastructure fit and accuracy of the voice biometrics engine. Before the implementation, a limited pilot of the project was funded and constructed involving a small segment of Vanguard clients. The full implementation phase was funded based on the success of this pilot. This phase focused on business wide integration, enrollment and authentication call flow design and change management efforts.
Speaker:
Advait Deshpande, Sr. Manager, Retail Client Services Group, Vanguard
View Presentation
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Voice Biometrics Conference Networking Reception – Meet the vendors, solution providers and customers who are pioneering voice biometrics as enabling technologies.
Thursday, April 4, 2012
9:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m.
Keynote -Nuance Communications has built a large portfolio of speech processing and natural language understanding resources in order to provide a gratifying user experience. Thanks to Nuance Prodigy, Nuance offers its customers the ability to recognize a caller’s intent quickly and respond accordingly. Steve Chambers explains how voice-based authentication makes a good experience even better by providing strong confidence that an individual is the person he or she claims to be.
Speaker:
Dan Nordale – VP, Enterprise Marketing, Nuance Communications, Inc.
View Presentation
9:45 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.
Reality Check #2: Proof of Life – Proof of Life™ in Pakistan and around the world. VoiceTrust has ambitious plans to enroll millions of Pakastanis in a Proof-of-Life program not only to support mobile payments but also to prevent fraudulent ID claims from recipient of government social welfare payments.
Speaker:
Tariq Habib – Group CEO, VoiceTrusti
View Presentation
10:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. – Break
10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Panel Discussion: Best Practices in Enrollment, Authentication and Mobile Security – A quick readout of results from Opus Research’s recently published report leading to a wide-open discussion among solutions providers addressing the questions that implementers find most interesting: What’s the best way to enroll individuals for large scale implementations? Will there be global standards for voiceprint storage/sharing? How do you overcome replay attacks? How do you deal with differences in quality across mobile versus landlines versus VoIP? And many more.
Speakers:
Peter Soufleris, CEO, Voice Biometrics Group
Douglas Shand, Group CTO, Leading Software
Julia Webb, Executive Vice President, US Sales and Marketing, VoiceVault
11:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.
Reality Check #3: Multi-Factor, Mobile Authentication – Multi-factor, multimobile authentication to support mobile commerce, with illustration of VallidSoft’s proprietary technology
Speaker:
Daniel Thornhill, VP of Product Development, ValidSoft
11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Reality Check #4: Enterprise Password Reset – Hear how Courion and SecureRest are partnering to use voice biometrics to overcome the complexity involved in Enterprise Password Management.
Speaker:
Andy Osburn, CEO, SecureReset
View Presentation
12:15 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. – Lunch
1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Forensic Voice Biometrics – Voice identification as part of the nation-wide multi-biometric platform, case study from the federal police of Ecuador.
Speaker:
Alexey Khitrov, Strategic Development Director, Speech Technology Center
View Presentation
2:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
Reality Check #5: Electronic Healthcare Records – How to use voice biometrics in innovative ways to deliver the benefits needed for compliance with industry and federal regulations, cost control and excellent customer service, while ensuring medical practitioners are productive and effective..
Speaker:
Travis True, Vice President of Business Development, VoiceVault
View Presentation
2:45 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. – Break
3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Reality Check #6: Passive Detection – Discover more about the “transparent” use of voice biometrics in the contact center to detect fraud and promote higher levels of customer confidence and satisfaction.
Speaker:
Javier Cano, Pre-Sales Manager, Agnito
View Presentation
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Reality Check #7: Voice Biometrics Down Under – Based on experience in three separate implementations – in banking, government and healthcare – Auraya will provide perspectives on the power of dynamic tuning and adaptive technology to optimize authentication results
Speaker:
Dr. Clive Summerfield, Founder and CEO, Auraya Systems
View Presentation
4:00 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.
Securing Conversational Commerce: Vision Panel – Like all technologies voice biometrics must follow a maturity model that takes into account emerging value chains, customer readiness, societal and regulatory issues and overall efficacy. In our closing discussion we bring together thought leaders in the domains of enterprise software, security, and identity management to do a deep dive into the future of voice biometrics.
Speakers:
David Nahamoo, PhD IBM Fellow, Speech CTO & Strategist, IBM Research
Chuck Buffum, President, Buffum Consulting
Tim Christin, Vice President Market Expansion, LexisNexis
Dean Lindstrom, Founder and Principal, Cyberstrom LLC
On the eve of Opus Research’s Voice Biometrics Conference, multi-factor security specialist ValidSoft announced that mobile financial services specialist Utiba would be integrating authentication services based on the VALid-4F(R) platform into future solutions. This move has huge implications for the voice biometrics market, since ValidSoft has been showcasing mobile authentication services that merge “four factors,” including “conversational” voice verification, location awareness, spoof-resistant identity assertion to augment existing anti-fraud methods, including PINs or out-of-band delivery of “one-time-passwords.”
Singapore-based Utiba has spent more than a decade developing a software platform to support mobile financial services. It has established business relationships with scores of mobile carriers, as well as mobile payment platform providers including MasterCard’s association of payment card issuers and mobile commerce software specialist Alternet Systems Inc. All told, Utiba claims that its software is in use in 30 countries and that the “Utiba Mobility” platform has roughly 500 million subscribers giving rise to over 12 billion transactions each year. The platform enables those subscribers to send money, pay bill and receive payments, including wages and government transfer payments, from mobile phones.
Both Utiba and ValidSoft have been actively building a global footprint for secure mobile payments and e-commerce. Utiba is a private company and its revenue figures are not public. It has supported implementations such as G-Cash/Globe in the Philippines, Maxis Malaysia, True in Thailand and the Orascomm Group in Bangladesh. The relationship with Alternet Systems signals an intention to grow in North America.
As we’ve reported here, ValidSoft has been laying the foundation for growth in Western Europe, the Pacific Rim and North America. Clearly the planets are aligning for growth in the coming year.
News from VBC2012: LexisNexis, Agnitio and SpeechPro Augment their Voice Biometric Offers
One of the metrics for maturity of an emerging technology is the formal introduction of packaged products of services. It was gratifying to note that three members of the voice biometrics community made significant additions to their offerings in the past week. Two of them were formally unveiled at Voice Biometrics Conference-NYC.
LexisNexis started the wave when its Risk Solutions business unit introduced to new options to its Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) solutions targeting financial services, health care, government, and retail organizations. As described in this press release, the information giant has long offered a suite of identity proofing and authentication solutions, branded as Flex ID, Instant Authenticate, InstantID®, InstantID Q&A, Instant Verify, and TrueID®.
Kimberly Little, Director of Identity Authentication Solutions at LexisNexis spoke at VBC and provided us with more detail on the intent of the offer. The company has long offered biometric authentication based on fingerprints. It has now added the option for its customers to include voiceprints as an identifier and speaker verification as an authentication method to support phone based commerce for financial services or contact centers.
In addition, LexisNexis is providing the option for its clients to offer their customers a One Time Password, delivered as a text message, email or outbound phonecall when appropriate when businesses or government organizations require stronger authentication to support a transaction.
We were also pleased that two of the sponsors of VBC were able to launch new mobile products from the podium. Agnitio’s Emilio Martinez led off a panel on Mobile Authentication by introducing KIVOX Mobile and elaborating on how development for military, law enforcement and commercial markets has led them to shrink their speaker identification and authentication engine so that it can operate on an Android phone (coming soon on iPhone), even when it is disconnected from the wireless network.
SpeechPro formally announced VoiceKey, a new voice biometric platform that integrates and implements a number of the core technologies, features and functions that it has developed over the years. This includes the “fusion algorithms,” that have demonstrated improved accuracy; proprietary methods for liveness detection, along with gender detection and emotion detection; cross-channel verification based on short phrases; robust noise reduction and speech detection; multimodal capabilities, including support of mobile authentication.
Each of these announcements reflect the fact that voice biometric-based solutions are maturing. That was the major message behind a keynote address delivered by Nuance VP Dan Nordale and showing how the combination of voice authentication, natural language understanding and artificial intelligence was gearing up to support the best customer experience over phones, tablets and laptops.
The focus on mobile customer experience was further demonstrated by ValidSoft in a video demo of VALid and how a shopper could say pass phrase to authorize a payment and make a purchase. When Daniel Thornhill and Benoit Fauve walked through all the steps taking place “transparently” to the user, you realized that the system handled fraud reduction through detection of “SIM swapping,” location awareness and anti-spoofing as well as the voice biometric – all part of its SMART security architecture for mobile payments.
On the other side of the globe, ValidSoft was making news through a partnership with Utiba, a Singapore-based mobile payments specialist whose network supports roughly 40 mobile network operators and banking customers around the world. The companies claim that the partnership will have the potential to serve roughly 500 million subscribers with Utiba platform. ValidSoft CEO Pat Carroll noted that the company handled over 12 billion mobile payments last year.
Partnerships that span transaction processing, identity management, mobile payments are evidence that the value of voice biometrics is appreciated among a broad set of solutions providers. More alliances are bound to follow.
On Thursday March 22 at 2PM Eastern (11AM Pacific) I’ll be joined by Angel’s David Toliver and VoiceVault’s Julia Webb in a Webcast where we take stock of forces around the globe that militate toward using voice biometrics to secure mobile transactions and banking services.
Voiceprints are changing the way financial institutions serve their customers by providing the most accurate and advanced methods to secure mobile banking. Smartphone users are among the first beneficiaries as they increasingly rely on their mobile devices to manage online bank accounts and other private financial information. Likewise, banks and brokerage houses are registering their clients’ voiceprints and finding a way to shorten their authentication processes and cut costs, while improving the customer experience.
With customer experience management at the forefront of most financial enterprise initiatives, the need for a reliable, cost-effective and secure solution to verify a customer’s identity is more important than ever.
Register Here. We look forward to talking with you.
With stepped up online and mobile commerce, exposure to Identity Fraud is on the rise. Join Opus Research, Voice Biometrics Group and Voxeo to learn how voice biometric-based solutions can help individuals counteract that trend. In this Webcast, we’ll discuss:
How banks, brokerages, distance learning companies and others build a business case for voice authentication in the cloud
How practitioners overcome common barriers to adoption within their organizations
Why using voice creates a better customer experience
Practical measures for ensuring the proper level of security and accuracy
Join Voxeo’s John Amein, Voice Biometric Group’s Peter Soufleris and Opus Research’s Dan Miller as they share perspectives on voice biometric-based applications and use cases, and why many companies look to cloud-based service providers to help them add voice authentication to their service offerings.
Live Webcast: Voice Biometrics: Voice-based Authentication in the Cloud
Thursday, March 20, 2012 — 1 p.m. EST / 10 a.m. PST
Sign Up Below!
Or click here to register and view the replay.
VBC Case Study to Feature Vanguard Investments: “Voice Biometrics – To Be or Not To Be”
Investment specialist Vanguard Group conducted an extensive analysis of voice biometrics technology and its readiness for production deployment. A business case with a cost benefit analysis was prepared to validate the feasibility of a voice biometrics technology based solution for client contact center security. This was followed by rigorous evaluation of vendor products for infrastructure fit and accuracy of the voice biometrics engine.
At Voice Biometrics Conference-NYC, Advait Deshpande, Sr. Manager of the Retail Client Services Group at Vanguard will share the insights and experience gained as his company marched through the steps necessary to move from conception to implementation of voice biometric-based client authentication.
Before the implementation, a limited pilot of the project was funded and constructed involving a small segment of Vanguard clients. The full implementation phase was funded based on the success of this pilot. This phase focused on business wide integration, enrollment and authentication call flow design and change management efforts.
Advait has over 20 years of experience managing strategic technology programs and a diverse background in IT and business. He has been involved in security and client protection practices and is responsible for Vanguard’s client protection program. He led the feasibility analysis and implementation of a voice biometrics technology based solution at Vanguard.
Vanguard’s case study is part of a series of presentations offered integrated into the agenda as a “Use Case Showcase” at VBC. Attendees will have a chance to view presentations and carry out discussions with peers and practitioners from credit unions, retail banks, government agencies, system integrators, solutions providers and technology developers from around the world.
Click here to learn more and to register.
VoiceTrust Acquires Perceive Solutions; Expands “Free Form” Authentication Capabilities
With its acquisition of Perceive Solutions, Inc., VoiceTrust is proceeding along its designated path of supporting large-scale, multi-lingual voice authentication. Roughly a week ago, we reported that the Dutch government had granted funds to support large-scale enrollment of Pakistani citizens’ voiceprints as part of a fraud prevention program related to social welfare payments. This week, with the acquisition of Perceive Solutions VoiceTrust augments its core technology with a portfolio of code developed to enable “free-form” speech-based verification and identification.
Perceive Solutions was formed in 2008 as a vehicle to commercialize the technology developed by the IT research center, CRIM in Montreal. Under the direction of Perceive’s founder Roanne Levitt, Perceive and CRIM have packaged a suite of software and applications that are demonstrably different from competing technologies. By acquiring Perceive, VoiceTrust signals that free-form authentication – meaning the ability to support many languages or dialects in both enrollment and authentication processes – will be very important for mass enrollment in some challenging environments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Note that VoiceTrust CEO, Tariq Habib, will be a featured speaker at Voice Biometrics Conference-NYC (April 3-4). He will provide an overview of the Proof-of-Life initiative as a global “Reality Check” on the state of voice biometric use cases and deployments.
In yet another sign that the financial world is taking voice authentication more seriously VoicePay, the voice authentication service offered as part of the CashFlows division of Voice Commerce Ltd won the award for “Best Security or Anti-Fraud Initiative” at the annual Cards and Payments Awards ceremony in London. Barclaycard, HSBC Merchant Services, Lloyds Banking Group and The Cooperative Banking Group were the other Finalists in this category. In addition, the voice biometric engine that supports VoicePay was a Finalist in three other categories: best industry innovation of the year, best merchant acquiring initiative and best technology initiative of the year.
Voice Commerce established the CashFlows division to enable merchants to accept both e-payments and card payments over the Internet or mobile channels. As a principal Member of Visa and MasterCard, it already supports Verified by Visa and MasterCard Secure Code protocols, but also adds VoicePay, its voice biometric based payment authorization methodology or “voice signature service.” As of January 26, 2012, the company has also been a member of SWIFT (the global network that supports international wire transfers), enabling it to offer centralized, standard reporting; global reach; support of SWIFT Free Format messages; and direct access to Interbank Transfers, among other features.
