September 14 2023
In our last article, “Voice Biometrics For Private Banking and Wealth Management: A False Sense Of Security?”, we explored why voice biometrics is being questioned by consumers, governments, and policymakers around the world. The article established that against the growing threat of generative AI, voice is positioned as the easiest biometric modality to clone.
Now, we’re going to dive deeper into the exact disadvantages of voice biometrics. We’ll then explore face biometrics as an alternative authentication method – one that offers enhanced security against the evolving threat landscape while delivering a seamless user experience.
Financial institutions have sought to meet demand for end-to-end, convenient digital experiences in their wealth management and private banking organizations. This has involved a pivot towards remote onboarding, investing, and customer service.
Voice biometric technology has proven to be unreliable with increasingly advanced, effective, and accessible synthetic audio – voice cloning attacks are rampant. Voice biometrics has also come under fire for failing to meet performance and accessibility expectations.
Let’s break down the key issues with voice authentication:
How can facial biometric technology circumvent the various disadvantages of voice biometrics?
Firstly, the face can be verified against government identity documents. The voice cannot. This means you can establish a source of truth to match a remote identity against, and ensure the identifiers associated with that person are endorsed by a legal authority.
Secondly, face biometrics is fully accessible even for visually impaired users. By definition, voice biometrics require users to speak — meaning not all users can use the product.
Additionally, face biometrics is a mature technology and has performance benchmarks by government organizations and standards bodies. There lacks independent, objective ranking for voice biometric performance.
There are a number of key differentiators that iProov employs to stay ahead of other security methods and other vendors. This includes, though is not limited to:
These differentiators are essential to defend against generative AI and the growing threat landscape. The right biometric face verification solution can form the foundational technology for a customer’s entire identity lifecycle, whereas voice biometrics can only play a limited, unreliable role.
Given the above outlined concerns, the risks posed by voice cloning in the realm of financial services demands immediate attention and action. Face biometrics stands as the best alternative.
Because there is such little data inherent in a voice recording, it has ultimately become impossible to distinguish between the real and the forgery. Due to the proven ease of circumventing voice authentication with synthetic audio within financial services use cases, and the lack of assurance the technology delivers, voice biometrics should only be used in very low-risk scenarios.
In pivoting from voice biometric authentication to facial biometrics for onboarding and authentication, or using both technologies, financial services institutions can achieve higher assurance that remote customers are who they claim to be. This can reduce fraud and financial crime, mitigate the risk of regulatory noncompliance, and improve customer satisfaction.
Our next blog will examine how organizations can transition away from voice biometrics, and further details the specific differentiators that separate iProov face verification technology from other vendors.
If you’re interested in learning more about iProov’s biometric face verification technology – or how to transition from voice to face biometrics – you can contact us or book a demo directly here.