Venturing further into advanced technologies, the Manila unit of the American global banking giant Citigroup officially launched a voice-identification feature for customers for over-the-phone banking transactions.
The voice-biometrics authentication allows customers to be identified within 10 seconds of conversing with the bank’s contact centers, cutting down identification time 66 percent from the 45-second average that traditionally includes answering a series of verifying questions.
Citibank Philippines CEO Aftad Ahmed said this was not simply based on the customers’ voice recording and that the likelihood of an impersonator getting through the system was close to none.
“Biometrics is not a voice recording; biometrics is a voice print. We pick out an algorithm in your voice, like translating your voice print into dots and dashes that’s recorded on a platform. It’s not the recording that’s going to be used for identification and authentication. It’s the unique voice print,” he told financial reporters.
“We want to protect your account to an even greater extent,” Consumer Banking Head Bea Tan added.
According to Breach Level Index, over 4.52 billion data records were lost or stolen since 2013 globally with over 3.51 million records compromised daily. Only 4 percent of these were considered secure breaches, where encryption was used and the stolen data was rendered useless.
In this regard, Customer Franchise Head Roy Villareal explained that the bank did not veer away from the traditional authentication method, but rather beefed up the security further to ensure that no fraud passes through the lender’s systems. The service should also enhance customer experience, shorten authentication time and make banking more convenient.
“In terms of development, this is something that has already been tested in a very mature market where we have a very large customer base,” Ahmed said of the more than 100 million customers they provide service to in the United States.
The voice-biometrics feature was approved by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in March this year and had undergone an assessment first before it was initially rolled out in September to Citibank employees and select clients. To date, over 7,000 accounts have enrolled under the biometrics feature. An average of a thousand customers enroll daily.
The US-based lender is looking at 10,000 customers upgraded to the voice-biometrics authentication by the end of the week.
Further, Citi Philippines will equip its client base, now over a million, with voice biometrics, within 12 months. However, Ahmed said the feature will only be available to customers who use phone transactions, while those who frequently transact using their mobile phones will still be identified via fingerprint.
The bank aims to be the first financial-services firm to deploy voice-biometrics authentication across Asia Pacific, as Citigroup anchors on innovations in retail banking in the region. Across the region, the voice-biometrics feature was first launched in January in Singapore.
Currently, Citigroup has some 15 million consumer-banking customers in Asia Pacific and expects to have at least 1-million customers actively using voice-biometrics authentication in the next 12 months. Within three years, the bank expects the number of users to grow to 3 million.