CHICAGO, March 10, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Authentify, a leader in mobile, multi-factor authentication services for protecting user accounts from unauthorized access, today announced Authentify xFA™ SecureCallCenter, to help financial institutions fight fraud by imposters and protect call center representatives from social engineering attempts. The announcement of the new capabilities in the Authentify xFA™ platform is timely, given recent fraud perpetrated through banking call centers. In those attempts, imposters used stolen credit card information to activate Apple Pay™ accounts on new smartphones and purchase high value goods.
"The SecureCallCenter functionality provides a one-touch connection to an institution's call center," said Alan Dundas, Authentify's vice president of Product Architecture. "As financial services customers migrate to using mobile channels as the primary connection to their accounts, reusing the authentication from the mobile app across a different contact channel makes a great deal of sense."
Authentify has been authenticating online users for financial services firms using phone-based authentication since 2001. The company introduced mobile, app-based authentication services in 2011, concurrent with widespread use of smartphones by consumers. The new SecureCallCenter application assists mobile app users who wish to speak to a call center representative. To do so, a user logs into their copy of the institution's mobile app. The end user then taps a call center button, which triggers Authentify xFA's biometric authentication sequence. Behind the scenes, a voice channel call is also placed to the call center. Once the user successfully authenticates, the SecureCallCenter app connects the call and passes the end user's contact and account information to a module at the call center console. The module interprets the information for the console, enabling the information to be displayed to the next representative in the queue.
"This is a unique combination of security features where digital certificates, voice biometrics and a fingerprint could be coupled for authenticating an inbound call," said Dundas. "There are 60,000 customer service representatives employed across just the top 20 call centers in the U.S. The majority of them are operated by financial services. If you saved each representative only five minutes a day on authentication tasks, that translates to 250,000 employee hours per week. The ROI is easy to measure."
Authentify xFA SecureCallCenter is available today and requires the Authentify xFA mobile SDK to integrate with a financial institution's own mobile app. Actual financial account information is managed by the financial institution's app and procedures, while the authentication and biometrics are managed by Authentify.
About Authentify, Inc.
Authentify provides intuitive and consistent multi-factor authentication services for protecting user accounts or key information from unauthorized access. Where many authentication techniques are powerless when valid credentials are wielded by hackers and imposters, Authentify offers certainty, and certainty is power.
Authentify introduced the global security community to its phone-based user authentication services in 2001. Its original phone-based Security as a Service (SaaS) revolutionized the two-factor authentication market. Two-factor authentication (2FA), or two-step verification (2SV), has become a standard for protecting accounts of all types. Authentify xFA mobile multi-factor authentication technology, which employs app endpoints on smart devices, was introduced in 2013. For more information, visit www.authentify.com.