In the ongoing arms race between online security and the criminals who seek to compromise it, the user experience has occasionally seemed like collateral damage: being made to jump through increasing hoops to access their online services securely creates discontinuity for customers and excludes growing numbers through technical requirements, while compliance requirements become ever greater for financial services providers keen to protect their own risks.
A new customer-centric partnership between Callsign, a London-based pioneer of the identity revolution, and global business cloud communications leader Vonage (via their Nexmo API programme), is determined to challenge this situation. Callsign’s award-winning Intelligent Driven Authentication seamlessly verifies and authenticates users in deeper and more personal ways, yet without getting in the way of the CX interaction, and their Head of Partnerships, Ryan Gosling, was keen to bring on board the perfect vendor blending call and SMS products to layer with their authentication service to create the most frictionless connection service between banks and their customers:
“When you think about the history of authentication, we started with password and username, which can be hacked quite easily. Then we started to move in the direction of card readers, which are very secure, but awkward - you have to carry around this extra device.
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Ryan Gosling[/caption]
“At Callsign now the future is not around what you know or what you have, but what you do - this is where the artificial intelligence and machine learning comes in. Looking at things like device behaviour and location among thousands of potential data points, we can build a really deep profile or identity for an individual, a passive system which doesn’t rely on data being entered - so it can identify and onboard you much more quickly”.
In September 2019, new requirements for authenticating online payments will be introduced in Europe as part of the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), and some banks are going to have to authenticate their customers more securely than they presently do. The Vonage/Callsign partnership, with its SDK for native deployment in any provider’s own platform, is a solution helping to meet the new requirements, without creating increased friction for users.




