Persay Ltd., a vendor of biometric speaker verification technology, has announced it will deploy its FreeSpeech biometric speaker verification system in Bank Leumi's VoIP contact center.

This deployment extends the bank's existing FreeSpeech system, Persay officials say, and will support its new VoIP contact center. The deployment will be performed in cooperation with IBM (News - Alert) Global Services Israel.

The system integrates with such CTI and CRM systems as Genesys (News - Alert) and Siebel

FreeSpeech is being billed as a tool for managing operational risks and fighting identity theft in contact centers. It transparently authenticates the bank's customers while they are engaged in a conversation with the contact center agent.

The system monitors the customer's voice in real time and compares it to the customer's pre-enrolled voiceprint, acquired from previous calls to the contact center. FreeSpeech also performs blacklist checks on voiceprints created from fraudulent calls.

Persay's marketing it to new VoIP contact centers as a software-only product that "minimizes installation efforts and hardware expenses." And the fact that FreeSpeech enrolls and verifies the customers in the background of the call makes it easy to deploy from an operational standpoint.

Persay's CEO, Almog Aley-Raz cites recent regulatory guidelines "as well as the growing number of cases of identity fraud" as reasons why financial services are looking for such a product, calling his company's product "the world's first text independent speaker verification system for VoIP contact centers."

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.