Semafone, a company that provides software for secure contact centre transactions, recently won the award for “Most Disruptive” business in the 2018 PYMNTS Voice Challenge. The contest is a global event designed to celebrate the commerce solution that introduces the best prototype integrated with the Amazon virtual assistant.
Semafone won the award with their “Phone Concierge” system, using voice payments and authentication through the Amazon Echo’s Alexa. The system uses ID&V to secure and enhance phone-based transactions on a “card-not-present” basis – like the transactions performed in enterprise contact centres so that customers can authenticate outgoing and incoming calls.
What is Semafone Phone Concierge?
The Phone Concierge service from Semafone is a single-use, time-based voice token solution wrapped up in the “Three Little Words” service created by the brand. The “3LW” solution is generated based on user and merchant credentials by the Semafone back-end system, then they’re supplied over the voice channel, which establishes a computer-telephony connection.
When asking a merchant to register payment requests, clients can authorise payments simply by supplying a single-use voice token that completes the transaction. This moves the payment channel from voiced-based transactions to low-risk eCommerce services.
According to the Global Solutions Director of Semafone, Ben Rafferty, voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa are becoming a more common fixture within both the enterprise and consumer worlds. Today, clients already trust these devices with huge amounts of sensitive data. With their Phone Concierge service, Semafone simply wanted to discover how they could use Alexa to create more secure CNP purchases. The brand noted that it was delighted to win the award for disruption and that they will be continuing to work on the Concierge service in the future.
Next Level Voice Support
With the help of the 3LW strategy, the Phone Concierge will also be offering reciprocal caller authentication features to their customers, which means that phone calls can be validated between two distinct entities. When a bank or financial institution calls, the consumer can prompt Alexa to ask who is calling, and Alexa provides 3LW to the end-user, which the merchant can submit for authentication in the Semafone back-end services. This reduces the risk of fraud and makes sure that clients can rest assured that their calls are genuine.
The CEO of PYMNTS.com, Karen Webster, noted that Semafone’s prototype demonstrates how powerful voice can be when it comes to securing payment data and solving significant problems for business environments. PYMNTS are just one of the organisations looking forward to seeing how the Semafone technology might inspire other innovators to develop new use cases for secure payments.
