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Compared to digital channels the contact centre can often be overlooked, making the contact centre a weak link and critical fraud vulnerability.  Rather than a reliance on cumbersome and ineffective knowledge-based verifications, Gartner advises that “organisations must deploy a layered defence of identity proofing, fraud detection and authentication capabilities, closely coupled with tighter integration into cross-channel […]

Proving customers are who they say they are when they reach the call centre has been a challenge ever since companies first started taking inbound calls. In those early days, you depended upon good faith and perhaps a few knowledge-based questions to pass the gatekeeper and access the account. Today, technology has given businesses a […]

Shifting channel trends create new risks for customers The ways in which we engage with our financial providers have changed dramatically in recent years. For some time now, banks have been driving more of their customers into direct contact channels – internet browser, mobile app and telephone – ostensibly to reduce costs. Twenty years of […]

There’s nothing fraudsters love more than disruption and uncertainty. And in the last year, we’ve all had a little bit more disruption and uncertainty than we expected. This is a fertile breeding ground for fraud, and sure enough, fraud cases have risen some 63% over the past year. That means contact centres now have to […]

Disruption is the ideal breeding ground for fraud and there can be no greater disruptor of the market than a global pandemic. To find out what organisations can do to protect themselves and their customers from the perils of fraud, we spoke with Ian McGuire, Fraud and Biometrics Specialist at Nuance Communications – a pioneer […]

We all know the challenges of Knowledge-Based Authentication in the contact center.

In 2020, a study found that a total of 76% of banking fraud is committed through internet banking and 13.8% through mobile channels. The third most common type is fraud through the contact centre, at 10.2%. When planning a fraud prevention strategy, banks typically focus on protecting digital banking channels. But what these numbers don’t […]

Making payments from your bank account has never been easier. With the advent of open banking and the growing use of mobile banking apps, we can transfer money literally at the touch of a button (or screen).

Just like everyone else, the Smartnumbers team have spent the best part of the eighteen months working from our beds, kitchens and spare rooms. Before the pandemic, we’d never have imagined that remote working could actually… work – or, at least, not this well. But with great challenges comes great innovation – and we’ve all […]

The COVID-19 pandemic created a perfect storm for scams, with nuisance calls and messages increasing by 27% in just four months at the end of 2020. Through credible caller IDs and threatening messages, fraudsters may claim they’re from HMRC, Amazon, or Test and Trace – all with the intention of stealing information and dupe people out […]