Lloyds Banking Group has announced its plans to become the first organisations in Europe to introduce new crime prevention technology to help protect its 30 million customers from telephone fraudsters. The state-of-the-art approach is known as "phoneprinting", and creates an "audio fingerprint" of each call to highlight unusual activity and stop criminal callers.
Commenting on this news is Jules Campeau, Chief Revenue Officer at NuData Security, said: "Lloyd’s customers should be able to rest a bit easier knowing that Lloyd’s is embracing new technology in their efforts to protect customers against the criminal use of stolen identities resulting from the many data breaches that we have seen these past years. Many bank customers fear that their accounts will be taken over from thieves who have gotten hold of their credentials and then use their real personally identifiable information (PII) to phone into a bank to change key account information and gain control of the account. The industry has certainly seen a rise in stolen PII data like names, addresses, friends and spouses, but also facial scans, fingerprints and biometric data. As of yet, Voiceprinting may be the least likely of the physical/active biometric data to be spoofable, especially when layering it with multiple other interaction data points such as location, number history, call type etc.
User verification methods that use cross channel data points are becoming the new standard in user verification to stop fraudsters who already have access to so much of our stolen PII data online. Having technologies like this in place seems like it would help passively verify users using multiple factors.
The one area we have to remember, however, is that anytime we base authentication upon data that can never be changed, we add risk to consumers who bear the burden of proof for a lifetime. If the biometric data should ever be compromised, physical biometrics are unchangeable. Taking biometrics beyond physical biometrics such as single-point fingerprint, retinal or facial scan and layering additional behavioural attributes and passive biometrics elevates the static data to a dynamic model much akin to the proverbial moving target.
That said, it’s encouraging that Lloyds is using this layered biometric and behavioural model as it has little to no impact on users. We’ve been seeing the shift for a long time as banks have been actively reducing friction based security controls at verification, opting now for systems that are able to passively collect and analyse live customer data in real-time without creating angst on the part of their customers. Our solution which uses behavioural data, rather than physical data like voice, performs powerful analysis in real-time. It can return an identity confidence score almost instantaneously and adds yet another layer of frictionless protection for our customers."