Multipoint Caller Authentication - An AI based voice biometrics solution for real-time fraud detection and prevention in the call centre

The call centre industry in the UK employs about 812k people \[source: Cactus Search\] handling over a billion calls per annum, 68% of which are using the voice channel \[Source: Call Centre Helper 2021\]. This industry, which is focused on supporting consumers, collectively hold personal records of most, if not, all of the adult population in the UK, making call centres a prime target for Cyber criminals attempting to takeover accounts and other fraudulent transactions.

**Cybercrime - Social Engineering**

Since IT industry has invested in security hardening, we can now see that attackers have refocused to become experts using psychological techniques, such as using emotional trigger words, to influence human behaviour and vulnerabilities to create a sense of trust, urgency and authority to encourage the victims to disclose sensitive information.

The human actions represent a critical vulnerability for both businesses and individuals with 82% of breaches against businesses involving a human element and social engineering. \[Source: AAG 2022\]

**Call centres' business challenge**

\***Competitive landscape --** need to survive in highly competitive call centre business

\***Customer expectations --** customer expectations of frictionless service

\***Staff attrition --** high turnover of staff that need continuous awareness training

\***Global delivery centres --** services are delivered from centres from multiple centres (inside and outside UK)

\***Staff motivation --** Low pay and pressures on performance leads to low morale

**Current way of working to prevent fraud**

\***Restrict information access --** Show only what agent needs to see, which often leads to complacency in sharing seemingly innocuous information with callers

\***Awareness Training --** Agents under performance pressures are asked to identify possible threats and raise alerts.

\***Oversight --** very little oversight on policy adherence to see whether potential security issues are managed effectively, since less than 2% of the call conversations are ever checked.

**CXReview Proposed Solution: Multipoint Caller Authentication (MCA)**

A totally frictionless, standalone and passive solution that can be deployed in any call centre within half a day to start listening for Cyber criminals.

An AI and ML driven call listener will start as soon as the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is triggered to ascertain whether the caller needs to go through additional security checks, using audio signal analysis to identify the caller (using Voice Biometric).

Continually build the caller behavioural profile using AI models of known characteristic augmented with emotional characteristics markers to build the most complete picture of the criminal.