editor’s question
W?
BRETT BERANEK, VP
AND GM SECURITY
AND BIOMETRICS,
NUANCE
COMMUNICATIONS
ith a massive shift
to work-at-home,
enterprises need
to be aware of
evolving threats
and fraudsters
looking to take
advantage of this societal change.
Fraudsters don’t stop their crimes
because of a pandemic. They often seize
the immense change that comes with an
event like this to ramp up activity. For
example, now more than ever, secure
contact centres are a necessity for
organisations to interact with customers.
With the recent shift to a stay-at-home
world, there has been a significant
increase in fraudster attacks against call
centres – testing for vulnerabilities by
directly attacking work-at-home agents,
or alternatively, pretending to be remote
agents to test for weaknesses that may
allow them to perpetrate fraud.
To keep bad actors at bay and ensure
the security of their operations
and customers,
organisations must
arm themselves with
tools that will keep
disruptions caused by
fraud to a minimum.
Organisations that
have deployed
biometrics are finding
the technology to be
incredibly useful in this
effort because it can
identify fraudsters, instead
of relying on more traditional
methods focusing on established
suspicious transactional patterns.
There are several applications for
biometrics to help solve some of the
new and more complex challenges
organisations are facing today:
Fighting new influx of fraud attempts:
Many organisations, including financial
institutions, insurance companies,
telecom providers and citizen-facing
government agencies, are seeing
a massive surge in call volumes as
brick-and-mortar locations shut down.
And in some cases, they are seeing
an enormous increase in inquiries and
transactions across digital channels.
With this surge, it’s a big ask to expect
customer care agents to separate
Fraudsters don’t
stop their crimes
because of a
pandemic. They
often seize the
immense change
that comes with an
event like this to
ramp up activity.
Biometrics proves
to be an invaluable
tool to automatically
identify when
fraudulent calls are
being placed.
fraudsters from real customers while
trying to address customer needs.
After all, it’s a customer care agent’s
role to focus on helping customers.
Biometrics proves to be an invaluable
tool to automatically identify when
fraudulent calls are being placed
– removing pressure from frontline
customer care agents and protecting
them from social engineering.
Letting agents safely work from
home without comprising security:
Empowering agents to work remotely
comes with a set of challenges,
especially when agents are using
their personal laptops, desktops and
mobile phones on the job. This rapid
shift to work-at-home agents created
countless opportunities for fraudsters.
There is vast potential for biometrics
to improve internal security checks in
these situations by verifying the identity
of agents and preventing fraudsters
from taking over agent accounts.
Biometrics authentication also allows
organisations to display less customer
personal information to agents, which
consequently reduces the risks of
occupational fraud in a remote-work
context where the lack of direct
supervision provides an opportunity
for bad actors.
With biometric solutions, enterprises
can keep bad actors at bay, ensure the
connections they need to make with
customers are safe and secure and
allow their organisations to adapt rapidly
to emerging threats. u
30 Issue 25 | www.intelligentciso.com