Intelligent Authentication and Fraud Prevention Intelliview: Solutions for Emerging Security Threats and CX Challenges

“You never have a second chance to make a !rst impression” is the advertising slogan of a men’s suit maker in the 1960s. It has new meaning and relevance today as a growing number of commercial conversations take place over span of time, using a variety of devices. After Web searches, consultations with trusted “friends” on social networks and navigating through e-commerce websites, the last thing that an individual prospect or customer wants to do rummage through their memory for a password or !gure out the answers to “challenge questions.”

For decades, bands of imposters have treated contact centers as the weakest links in enterprise efforts to prevent the hacks that lead to loss of customer data or wholesale theft of goods, services and money. Long ago, authentication procedures have replaced “How may I help you?” as the routine !rst step (more accurately, a barrier) to customer care or assistance. Procedures have been time-consuming, annoying and ineffective. The most popular practices include SMS-based delivery of “one-time-passwords” (OTP) and knowledge-based authentication (KBA). The former is vulnerable to rudimentary “man-in-the-middle” attacks and the latter largely relies on information that imposters can compile from publicly available sources.

Opus Research de!nes the term “Intelligent Authentication” (IAuth) to capture a range of solutions and offerings that have evolved since voice-based authentication to include additional biometric factors (facial, !ngerprint, behavioral), fraud detection, digital orchestration, and continuous authentication.