In this podcast, Senior Lead of Nuance, Carahsoft, Elizabeth Savage, discusses security and biometric solutions from Nuance, with features such as integrated authentication, multi-modal authentication, fraud detection plus prevention, deep neural networks (DNN) and advanced algorithms to detect synthetic speech, recordings, and brute force attacks.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Nuance and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around AI and biometrics titled unmatched security through the power of voice, where Elizabeth Savage senior team lead of Nuance at Carahsoft will discuss why leading organizations around the world are addressing security concerns using Nuance AI driven biometric security solutions.
Elizabeth Savage: Thank you, Juliana. And thank you everybody for joining us today. During today's presentation, I'll share with you how your organization can address the challenges associated with authentication and fraud prevention for good. Today's presentation, it's not a deep dive into how our technologies work. Instead, I'll be focusing on why Nuance Solutions deliver better outcomes than any other approach to authentication and fraud prevention. I'll be showing you how your customers could authenticate with Nuance solutions, and how we'll solve your fraud challenges. Nuance has a rich omni-channel engagement solutions portfolio and platform that enables brands to deliver this effortless experience to the consumers. Nuance provides solutions for customer acquisition and customer care, enabled by digital voice, outbound and security product offerings. That's all powered by AI technology enablers and deployed by Nuance as professional services team. And that's the Nuance story. Market leading brands do worry about starting their digital transformation journey with one vendor, let's say virtual assistant deployment, and then having to go through difficult integrations and deployment nightmares when needing to add a live chat or voice biometrics to enhance their customer experience. But that's not the case with the Nuance portfolio. You can start with one of our offerings and easily expand into other areas because of the power of AI and the omni-channel platform data security, secure authentication and fraud prevention, along with BI platform tooling and a rich set of API's and SDKs. Power the platform with conversational human assisted and cognitive artificial intelligence. The platform targeting engine enables targeting the right consumer with the right experience at the right time, while lowering costs and increasing revenue for your organization. As we discussed this, there's four main pillars the portfolio and today we're going to be focusing on specifically security. The security portfolio is a unified platform that provides authentication and fraud prevention across voice and digital channels, including interactive voice response systems, contact centers and mobile apps. So it's utilizing a variety of different capabilities, identification and verification. So we're speaking about at this point, voice, face, behavioral and other emerging modalities to provide you with a combination of authentication choices to meet your specific needs. Fraud Prevention, fraud is rampant right now. And if you have any presence on social media at all, you've probably seen over the past year or so, focus on Hey, we're all bored. Let's play a game. What's your maiden name? Where did you grow up? What's your favorite color, that type of thing? And although these are entertaining, you are quite literally handing known fraudsters, the unknown fraudsters, the answers to the most commonly Reset Password Reset questions, we'll get into a little bit of how we can come up with an alternative approach there in just a minute. But where this becomes a problem is in the age where we're sharing so much data about ourselves, whether it be social media, blogs, just speaking in general, signing up for different mailing lists and all that fraud truly is rampant and the more secure that your organization can be, the more trust and trusted that you're going to be by your consumers. And lastly, anti-spoofing. So making sure that someone can't use their voice or their different behaviors to replicate another individual when they really are not that person. There's a simple reason why organizations depend on Nuance as their solution provider for biometric customer authentication and fraud prevention than any other vendors combined. Nuance’s solutions deliver a better outcome. And that's, that's the story there. So Nuance delivers a 99% authentication rate and industry leading biometric authentication, detection of fraud attempts and automation of the manual authentication processes. So one of the things that we like to talk about here when we speak about verification is we're utilizing your voice print. So your voice is unique, right? It is specifically yours. But your voice print is secure. And your voice print is made up of all of these different physiological characteristics from the way that your mouth forms the word the way that your tongue hits the roof of your mouth. Everything from how your vocal cords vibrate to the way that your bone structure is, and it comes up together with a voice print that is unique, it's not able to be replicated. And the anti-spoofing technology that we spoke about a moment ago, is one of the ways that that prevents fraud. Your if we were we're recording this demonstration right now. And if you use this recording to try and authenticate me, it would not be able to be replicated, it would be flagged as fraud. In addition to that, we run into different situations where we have these recordings, and we've actually put them to the test. We so far, no one has been able to break the solution. Fully. There is a 99% authentication rate as an industry leading biometric authentication 90% detection of fraud attempts and 85% automation of manual authentication processes. You compare these with the likelihood of a password reset or someone entering in someone's password to try and represent themselves as that individual. And the comparison is second to none. So TD Bank deployed our suite and they are one of the reference customers that we're going to be providing some additional information on here in a few minutes. But why are better biometric solution? Alternative authentication and fraud prevention strategies often fail for the simple reason, they lose focus on the end goal, which is to identify the human being that is interacting with your organization. Approaches that focus on knowledge deliver a poor experience to consumers when they are unable to provide the appropriate data. For fraudsters committing fraud becomes a data mining exercise. A test it's becoming easier not harder. As we mentioned a few moments ago about the fact that fraud people are posting the answers to most commonly asked password reset questions on their Facebook pages. Approaches that focus on knowledge, deliver a poor experience to those customers when they're unable to provide inappropriate data. And so fraudsters committing fraud becomes habit, and identifying devices create frustration for consumers when they have to switch devices. While fraudsters can create new identities by simply cycling devices, and perpetrate fraud attacks with the simple click of a button. Only when you focus on the human, can you deliver a seamless and timeless authentication experience. And only when you focus on the human, can you actually solve the fraud problem, ensuring fraudsters end up behind bars. Nuance is actually the only manufacturer that works with law enforcement to identify not just identify known and unknown fraudsters, but lead them to prosecution. I mentioned timeless as a key benefit of using biometrics for authentication and fraud prevention. Your biometrics are valid throughout your lifetime, but data about you and the devices that you own change with incredible velocity. You get a new iPhone, you get a new Android phone. Your favorite band changes your favorite color changes, but Nuance a solution is valid over the lifespan of your customer relationship. And over the lifespan of the fraudster to leveraging Nuance Security Solutions allows your organization to have that timeless authentication process that's not tied to a channel, a device or dependent on the customer's memory. This leads to a great deal of value for your customers, which in turn drives very concrete and material benefits to your organization. For example, customers are not tied to any device, they are not burdened to remember any information. And they can have the same experiences with your organization, no matter what channel they choose to use. So showing you a concrete example of how Nuance is solution can transform the authentication experience. To illustrate how powerful biometric authentication approach can be, let's have a look at a customer journey. That's fairly typical with legacy authentication processes. Picture a customer that attempts to access your web portal, but they've forgotten their password. They attempt to authenticate a few times, but it locks their account as a result. So they dial into your contact center, bypass the IVR because they want to talk to a human. And then they're asked a number of security questions. They fail to general knowledge questions and are directed to a branch to validate their identity. This journey generates a lot of frustration, not just for the end, not just for your customer, but for yourself and for your call center agents because by the time that these folks get to those call center agents who are trying to help these folks, ask those knowledge questions, reset their passwords, they're dealing with a very agitated customer because they're just trying to access their accounts, and they're not able to get into it. And then when they don't understand the or don't remember the password reset questions, then that in turn brings more frustration. Nuance can turn these failures into positive experiences. So ultimately, we'd want to eliminate the password on the web, which would eliminate this scenario altogether. So for this example, we'll assume that that password is still in place. As the customer is failing the password entry process, Nuance is gatekeeper can biometrically validate that it is indeed the correct customer, despite the failed credential simply by tracking how the customer type their username and password. We can show this capability in a live demonstration and a one on one situation one on one meeting with you all following this if you'd like. But a new credential would immediately be issued on the web with this biometric verification. Or if your security policy requires a step up authentication process, the customer can be invited to do so in a mobile app with biometric credentials such as face recognition or voice biometrics, or depending on how you have things set up could also be directed to call the contact center. So we'll go ahead and at this point, assume that the customer hasn't downloaded the mobile app and decides to call in immediately as the call is answered. Gatekeeper is analyzing the call to assess the risk of the call, even if the customer simply requests an agent and skips the identity and verification process. Once they reach the agent. They're passively biometrically validated with two biometric methods, voice biometrics and conversation print. I want to illustrate in this example, how gatekeeper has a holistic view of the customer across sessions, and can biometrically authenticate them no matter how they interact with your organization. This example also illustrates how a layered approach to security can complement the biometric factors with the device, network and geography validation. So for example, if someone is logging in from Florida, but they're trying to log into a local bank or a local organization in Kentucky, for example, it's going to flag it and say, what was this guy logging in from Florida and initiate some additional security verification processes. This layered verification system has proved to why we are truly an industry leading identity and verification organization. And lastly, I want to focus your attention on this last step where gatekeeper leverages each interaction to continuously improve performance. So in other words, the more a customer interacts with you, the better their performance gets. Fraudsters like customers leverage various channels, using a variety of phones, digital and digital devices. They tend to cycle through these much more frequently than legitimate customers do as they tried to evade legacy fraud prevention techniques. The only way to catch a fraudster consistently is to track them, track the human not track their devices. Just with authentication. A biometric approach to fraud prevention allows you to identify fraudsters forever, no matter what device they use, where they're located, or what channel they use. biometric based fraud prevention not only drive down fraud losses more than any other approach, but it also provides the ability to address the fraud problem by driving for the arrest, prosecution and incarceration of these fraudsters at best. Other fraud solutions allow your organization to identify fraud attempts and prevent it from being successful, but allows the fraudsters to try again and again and again until they are ultimately successful. Nuance offers your fraud team with the tools to actually solve the fraud problem for good. The Nuance security solutions are the only ones that are in use by the FBI as well as other law enforcement agencies across the globe. No matter where your fraudster is attacking you from. There's a local law enforcement agency that has the same tools we're offering your fraud team so that they can jointly work in solving the fraud problem. Let's circle back to our free Nuance fraud attack scenario of how that same failed credential scenario could be exploited by the fraudster. So we'll take an example where a fraudster had purchased a database of customer data and credentials on the dark web. They attempt to authenticate with the credentials. But in this case, the fraudster is out of luck and they don't work. However, the fraudster is persistent. So they call into the contact center request an agent and based on the data that they have on the customer. They're able to answer the security questions, issued a new credential and then the fraudster proceeds to perpetrate fraud in the digital channel. With Nuance gatekeeper, this attack vector would have been prevented. As the fraudster enters the customer credentials on the web security suite generates an alter as the behavioral biometric print mismatches and the accounts locked if the fraudster perseveres and places a call into the contact center, as soon as that call is picked up by the IVR. The call is flagged as high risk due to a failure across the board of intelligence detectors and the device print. The fraudster is then transferred to an agent, where the agent asks the fraudster for security questions. And even though that fraudster answers all the questions accurately, gatekeeper detects the fraudsters voice and conversation print. And the case is sent to the fraud team so that they can compile a case for law enforcement. And in parallel, the fraudsters’ data is sent to peers the Nuance audio share service. Now, I want to stop on that comment regarding data sharing for a moment, because Nuance does understand that a lot of organizations require that personal identity, valuable information to be kept private. So that feature is optional. If you would like to opt into that you can, but it is in no way required. So this is a quote coming from the head of fraud strategy and Relationship Management at the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Nuance is approaches beyond fraud prevention. It's not just about stopping financial losses. It's about disrupting criminals, and it's so very true. circling back to if you would like to opt in to the data sharing, Nuance optimization service that allows clients to share information of confirm fraudsters allows customers to jointly address the problem of fraudsters by pooling knowledge across organizations. Nuance will curate and manage lists of alleged fraudsters consolidating the knowledge across participating client organizations. And that helps you by allowing you to better protect yourself against fraud attacks by leveraging identified fraudsters from other organizations provides you better visibility into the fraudster population as a whole and allows you to share fraudster details between organizations to allow for creation of more precise fraudster profiles. In addition, you can collaborate on investigation and potentially prosecution of common fraudsters and uncover fraud patterns based off of global fraud profile. So what organizations are attacking how frequently and what tactics are being used. So circling back to gatekeeper as I mentioned, every organization that we support is different. So we have a variety of different options that you can utilize whether it be on premise in a private cloud, the cloud contact center, as a service, such as AWS Connect, or the Nuance hosted cloud. So each organization is different, we can work with you to determine which of these options would be best for your specific organization. Gatekeeper itself is genuine, generally a cloud native decision making state of the art AI about powered biometric solution for frictionless authentication, enabling customer organizations to mitigate fraud losses, improve operational efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction across both voice and digital channels. It's cloud platform agnostic towards a wide variety of cloud storage types, that provides dynamic scaling, so the scaling maintains steady and predictable performance at the lowest possible cost to you. And decreased setup and ongoing costs, continuous updates and improvements, and there's no need to plan for peaks. Basically, what you're allowed to, what you're able to do is authentication on the web through behavioral biometrics, fraud prevention on the web, through behavioral biometrics and bots detection, authentication in the voice channel. So with that, we're referring to voice biometrics, conversation, print device print, channel ID and geo ID, fraud prevention in the voice channel using conversation print, spoofing, attack, detection and voice using playback and synthetic anti spoofing capabilities, and step up authentication on a mobile app. So voice biometrics, behavioral biometrics and facial recognition. Some of the key differentiators that your organization will benefit from by selecting gatekeeper is it's the only solution to deliver a comprehensive authentication and fraud prevention solution across digital and voice channel. It's the only solution to deliver to biometric factors for the voice channel, the only one to offer three credentials for the voice channel, and the only to leverage their generation deep neural networks that underpins its algorithms. All of these unique capabilities drive the best in class authentication, success rates, automation rates, and fraudster authentication rates. Beyond these technology advantages, gatekeeper is also the only solution as we've mentioned, to have led to the successful arrest, prosecution and incarceration of fraudsters and the only solution to become the standard for law enforcement and public security agencies. And it's all for a simple reason. It's the only solution that can stop these bad actors.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or Nuance can assist your AI and machine learning interests, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at Nuance@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.