Citibank has introduced voice biometrics to identify customers calling its support centres in Asia. The facility started in Taiwan last week and will be extended to Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and India over the next few months. The entire Asia-Pacific region would be covered before the end of 2017.
The facility would eliminate the need for passwords and security questions for customers while interacting with the call centres. The bank has claimed that voice biometric authentication would make the verification process easier, faster, and more secure for clients.
Customers can opt for voice identification by recording a ‘print’ of their voice that will be stored by the bank and tapped when the user calls Citibank. The voiceprint of a customer who opts for this facility would be stored in a totally secure encrypted form. According to Anand Selvakesari, Citi’s Asia Pacific Head, Consumer Banking, the verification process would take less than 15 seconds, as against about 45 seconds in the manual process, thus cutting 66% of the time for verifying the customer. That saving is huge, considering that the bank’s call centres in Asia-Pacific receive about 35 million calls a year. The bank has 15 million customers in the region, of which a million are expected to be early adopters and use voice biometrics authentication in the next 12 months. Would you be among them?