Speed, reliability, security: surely the three most essential components to any financial services enterprise tech stack.
For that most dynamic of sectors, differentiation is all about providing customers with surety that their money is safe, their investments are working, and their transactions never fail.
Banks, insurance agencies, accountants, mortgage lenders, payment service providers, stockbrokers, investment advisory firms, wealth management consultancies, credit card issuers – they all must respond to today’s always-on demand for the ultimate omnichannel communication experience.
A cloud communications platform as a service (CPaaS) provides an easy way for businesses to add new communication capabilities to existing applications without having to build those capabilities from scratch.
This can save businesses time and money, while also providing them with more flexibility in how they communicate with customers and employees.
In the financial services sector – where so much is at stake – it pays to partner with a provider that has all the bases covered.
“For businesses in that sector, it’s critical that their SMS and voice communications are delivered how and when they need them to be,” says Tony Graham, head of product marketing at leading global CPaaS provider Plivo.
“Adding a provider that has the expertise and reliability to ensure that happens can be the most important and valuable decision they make.”
By deploying a powerful, feature-rich CPaaS like Plivo’s, financial services businesses can use automated voice and messaging to improve customer service through the use of interactive voice response (IVR) menus, send outage alerts or market movements, and deliver bulk marketing messages.
They can also personalize customer experiences with account notifications for things such as low balances, overdrafts, margin calls, and suspicious activity on accounts, and seek feedback from customers.
Improved internal communications are also supported: keeping staff updated on hours, policies, and other information.
Plivo customer Become helps small and medium-sized businesses obtain funding.
“Thanks to the Plivo platform, we are able to easily traffic calls and redirect them to an available account manager in the case of a new customer or to an associated account manager if they’re an existing customer,” says CEO Eden Amirav.
“It makes the whole communication process much smoother and more efficient.”
Crucially, Plivo’s platform supports multichannel two-factor authentication and one-time password functionality for financial transactions, including those delivered via mobile apps.
It ensures organizations’ one-time passwords make it to the correct destination fast, plus two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to existing identity and access management programs.
Sector best-practice is for two-factor authentication messages to arrive with customers within a 10-15-second window. The Plivo platform is able to identify invalid phone numbers, discover the fastest routes for optimal message delivery, and support timely, high-volume delivery.
“Though SMS is very reliable, it can be subject to delayed or dropped delivery as a result of high network loads, unreliable carriers in some countries, and a host of other issues,” says Graham.
“When SMS authentication fails, organizations can easily implement voice messaging as a fallback. Voice has the same advantages of ubiquity and intuitive use that SMS offers. Because voice calls sync immediately versus being stored or forwarded like SMS, voice calls are prioritized on the carrier network, and as a result, are more reliable than SMS. The combination of SMS with voice fallback is the most reliable of all.”
Of course, any company that intends to verify or authenticate users via SMS or voice calls needs superior global reliability in order to ensure a seamless customer experience.
To support that situation, the Plivo platform includes specific features to make two-factor authentication even more seamless, including geo permission management – the ability to control the list of destination countries to which SMS and voice calls can be made, and the ability to disable communications to high-risk countries where organizations do not have users.
It also features international toll fraud protection – the ability to manage connectivity to global high-risk premium numbers prone to international toll fraud attacks, and the maintenance of organizations’ own destination number blacklists.
Cleverly, pattern-based trigger alerts are issued when SMS or voice activity delivery rates drop significantly due to engagement with invalid or unallocated phone numbers.
It’s all smart stuff that has the power to protect financial services customers whilst simultaneously improving the overall communication experience.
It seems that, in a sector in which investments are key, CPaaS is one upon which the returns can be significant.
Ready to cash-in?
Learn more about Plivo’s financial services API.
