The contact centre is a hot point for consumer fraud in the financial services sector, with 61% of fraud losses involving contact centres.

Currently the status quo involves using authentication processes that help to mitigate consumer fraud, such as entering a PIN or answering questions. Many of these measures can be circumvented by fraudsters with access to leaked or hacked data sources.

Increasingly, leading financial services institutions are combining the next level of authentication with an ecosystem approach to their security to push back against fraudsters.

Here are three developments contact centre and security professionals need to be investigating today.

Voice biometrics play a crucial role, not only in the contact centre, but in defence against consumer fraud generally.

Ian McGuire, a leading expert at Nuance, notes the maturity of voice biometrics. They’re now used to authenticate genuine customers, detecting unusual behaviour, and keep track of known fraudsters.

Nuance is using its voice biometrics expertise to help major banks identify and maintain watchlists of known fraudsters. The company's technology can also identify 'synthetic voices' that may have been generated using deepfake technology, representing an important challenge to one of the most worrying new attack vectors available to fraudsters.

Voice biometrics are also extremely useful in the development of frictionless authentication processes. Nuance's technology allows organisations to authenticate based on natural conversations, eliminating the need for callers to recite specific phrases and speeding up the authentication process seamlessly within the conversation.

Our innovation teams are developing advanced authentication solutions based on the latest developments in biometrics, identity, and cryptography - with a particular focus on continuous authentication as a defence.

We’re exploring inherent, consistent security factors such as a user's face and the ways authentication can use these factors in sensitive working environments.

If a solution continuously analyses the face and surroundings of the person sitting at a computer workstation, it’s then able to generate alerts and take specified action if something changes. As a result, the solution can block access to a certain resource, or can lock the workstation altogether if it stops recognising the face of the person in front of it.

Continuous authentication is an important focus for the security community, and its technologies will soon find uses in consumers' daily lives. Our commitment is evident through filed patents covering mood-based policy enforcement, smart home control, and context-dependent access.

Building a modern security architecture can be challenging for financial services institutions. Navigating interoperability issues, addressing legacy system complications, and coping with a lack of in-house expertise make the process intricate.

Contracting with multiple vendors further complicates matters. It can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive task, often leading to compromises.

Our security platform has been designed to solve this problem. We empower financial services institutions to manage fraud and risk across their whole organisation, providing access to the most up-to-date thinking and technology from a diverse global security ecosystem through a single point of access.

We’re safeguarding the world's largest financial services institutions to protect themselves and their customers.