TransUnion launches a national voice bank in South Africa-hello voice biometrics

by TransUnion

Johannesburg – TransUnion has announced that it has begun development of a national Voice Bank in partnership with OneVault. This national Voice Bank will result in the use of stronger biometrics, like voice, to help businesses curb fraud and identity theft and therefore alleviate the growing concerns around information security disciplines. Voice biometrics is being adopted globally by companies, especially those with large contact centre operations, because it offers faster, improved authentication, a better customer experience and a reduction in fraud. TransUnion’s innovative offering is accessible via a hosted pay-per-use solution, enabling the benefits of voice biometrics to the local market.

TransUnion’s national voice bank offers significant benefits for both consumers and business.  Organisations that employ voice biometrics can reduce call handling times for agent-assisted calls, giving the ability to get to the heart of a consumer’s enquiry quickly and with the overall result of improved customer and agent satisfaction.  In addition, identification accuracy is increased which assists in helping to mitigate fraud.  As operational costs reduce, businesses can more aggressively and confidently evaluate and promote additional customer self-service.  In global studies, users experience approximately 80 percent faster authentication via voice biometrics, with approximately 90 percent of users preferring the solution over the status quo.  Thus, voice biometric authentication combined with other multi-factor authentication methodologies, can deliver enhanced business value.

TransUnion’s hosted solution

“Voice biometrics adds a new capability to TransUnion’s Fraud and Authentication solutions, which include knowledge-based authentication, fingerprint verification, fraud prevention models and automated decision support solutions, ” said TransUnion’s Tim Frost, vice president: Product Management & Development. “Our partnership with South Africa’s leading specialist voice biometric solutions provider has meant that we can offer our customers an important addition to our authentication solution stack.  Voice biometrics provides a step-up in security, a new user experience and a service differentiator, as well as driving lower operational costs. It lowers business risk, while helping to improve business competitiveness and increase customer satisfaction”.

The hosted Voice Bank solution currently has 30,000 voice prints, primarily acquired via TransUnion’s consumer call centre, but this number is expected to grow rapidly.  TransUnion anticipates that building this Voice Bank will deliver significant value to corporate customers as this data type is reliable and unique.

South Africa, like the rest of the world, is encouraging transactions and product applications to shift online, but consequently is seeing increases in identity theft and in card transaction fraud.  Consumers are increasingly vulnerable and technologies such as voice biometrics provide additional security measures that help to address these concerns.

Said Frost: “South Africa is at the start of this journey. We are working to provide our customers with a trusted, nationally supported Voice Bank and voice biometric solution that will not just add security, but will support an improved end-consumer experience and digital business growth.”

About OneVault

OneVault is a focused Biometric Voice Authentication company.  They unlock the power of every individual’s voice to provide the most secure, remote authentication channel available. Their focus with respect to the voice biometrics space, has allowed them to develop a set of core competencies and capabilities that are unparalleled in the South African market. OneVault offers its clients secure, easily accessible, 3rd factor authentication that seamlessly integrates with their IT infrastructure. OneVault offers both on -premises and hosted solutions.  Its hosted offering means its clients’ can leverage their ‘tuned’ active voice authentication engine resulting in fast, simple solution deployment.