Kicking off the 2007CIAB Febraban (Brazilian Federation of Banks), South America’s premier banking conference, Wittel, a leading integrator of contact center solutions in Brazil, today announced a partnership with PerSay, the leading provider of advanced voice biometrics solutions, to combat the rising incidence of financial fraud in Brazil.

Voice biometrics technologies take advantage of the fact that each person’s voice is a unique and unobtrusive identifier, like a fingerprint. For contact centers that support banking, telecommunications and other industries, voice biometrics proves to be a cost-effective way to enhance security and improve customer convenience.

Wittel will look for opportunities to seamlessly integrate and support PerSay’s extremely reliable text-dependent VocalPassword and text-independent, transparent FreeSpeech speaker verification products into contact center solutions for Brazil’s leading financial services and telecommunications providers.

“Wittel is committed to offering our clients the most advanced technologies available to combat fraud. PerSay’s voice biometrics solutions clearly deliver cost-effective security, increase call center efficiency, and enhance the customer experience,” said Carlos Louro, President of Wittel. “The timing of this partnership is perfect; Brazil’s leading financial and telecom providers are looking for new approaches-like voice biometrics-to reduce the incidence of fraud.”

“This is a unique opportunity for PerSay to partner with a dominant player in Brazil that can help us bring value to an emerging market here,” said Ariel Freidenberg, Executive VP, PerSay Global Sales and Development. “PerSay is well positioned to deliver simple, natural, voice-based identification and verification solutions to the broad spectrum of telecom and financial services customers in Brazil-from the average consumer to high-net-worth individuals.”

ACB’s 1,000 bank members now can be armed with Edentify’s innovative technology to expose and squelch ID theft and fraud, and protect customers’ identities and banking assets.

America’s Community Bankers (’ACB’), the national trade association committed to strengthening the competitive position of community banks, has selected Edentify, Inc., a leading provider of identity management solutions, as a Preferred Solution Provider to its 1,000 ACB community bank members nationwide, providing the means to root out and thwart ID theft and fraud. Edentify is ACB’s Preferred Solution Provider of ID theft and fraud detection and prevention software, and will offer its proprietary IDBenchmark(TM) 2.0 software to ACB bank members.“Our solutions can provide ACB’s bank members with tight financial security and protection against ID theft and manipulation that works in real time,” says Terrence DeFranco, CEO of Edentify.

“Engaging proactive partners is a major component in our marketing strategy, allowing us to gain critical mass for our solutions, and it is very exciting for us to count ACB as one such partner. ACB member banks utilizing our solutions will be equipped with a robust suite of identity management solutions available in the market, and they will be able to uncover fraudulent activity immediately as it occurs, easily and quickly pinpoint the origin, and take prompt steps to mitigate any damaging effects. With our technology, ACB’s members will be well prepared to protect their organizations and their customers against the growing scourge of ID theft and fraud.”Edentify’s complete software package can detect, prevent, and monitor ID fraud and theft for ACB’s members via three products based on our IDBenchmark(TM) technology.” (more…)

Zions Bank has become the first major financial institution to offer the cashing of cheques with a quick finger scan. Customers may set theselves up for easy cheque cashing by bringing two pieces of identification, along with their finger. That fingerprint is then tied to that individual, and future visits to the bank will only require a simple biometric scan to allow cashing of cheques.

“Security is one reason to implement it. The other is convenience and speed,” says Rob Brough, Zions Bank Senior Vice President. “There are many in our community who don’t have a relationship with a banking institution of any kind and when they receive a payroll check, they need somewhere to cash it.” The new system is available at 12 branch locations in Utah and Idaho.

Source - KCPW