With the increasing requirement for convenience from consumers in developed economies and the essential need to provide access to financial services to consumers with limited access to other electronic channels, phone banking provides the solution.
By offering phone banking as an additional electronic channel, banks have a significant opportunity to reduce cost by maximizing existing infrastructure and reducing further investment in expensive infrastructures such as branches and ATM networks, whilst also opening up other potential revenue streams. Phone banking provides excellent opportunities to existing programs, such as branchless banking and mobile phone banking.
Our phone banking solutions deliver mobile transacting capability to existing traditional bank accounts, securely over a normal phone 24x7x365.
As an additional electronic channel to an already existing bank account, phone banking enables the consumer to make payments such as bill payments and transactions including money transfers, banking enquiries, (balances, detailed and mini statements) as well as the ability to both fund and withdraw funds from the account.
We also provide seamless transition from Phonebanking to callcenter agents and back. For example, agents could be conferenced into a phonebanking session to assist callers in the choice of their menu. Phonebanking can help curbing overall traffic to the callcenter or be used only during peak hours.
Technology
The hardware and SW licences for the phonebanking platform (Voicegateways, and VXML servers) are the same as you are already using for your Cisco Callcenter. The phonebanking can however also run independently of a callcenter, or together with a non-Cisco Callcenter.
Regarding the application itself and for back-office integration, the layout and interfaces are exactly the same as for an e-banking interface. Phonebanking is running on a normal Apache Tomcat WWW-Server. Instead of the protocol being HTML - as it would be for e-banking, the protocol is VXML (Voice Extended Markup Language). Any business logic and software objects that you already have on your e-banking application can be carried with minor adaptations to your phonebanking application.
You could for example give your WWW-payment solution a voice. The same type of interaction that is happening between merchants and payment switches over https and SSL on the WWW can be carried to VXML-based solutions.
Security
Security mechanisms used in phonebanking should be proportional to the sensitivity of information exchanged. For example, you might want to give your customers a quick and easy access to access enquiries and checkbook ordering without going through the highest level of authentication. However, if a customer wants to execute a large transaction to a new third party, then it might make sense to increase the level of security and to add things such as tokens, changing passwords and similar.
Regarding the security of the voice communications channel: GSM (mobile) communication is safely encrypted all the way to the last carrier switch. From there one needs to take care that the E1's between the carrier and your location can't be intercepted, or that the Voicegateways are located physically close to the carrier switch. From the Voicegateway to the VXML server or your core banking application, all communication can be encrypted using standard WWW-technologies, such as SSL. Landline phones all the way to the carrier switch are usually not encrypted and could possibly be wire-tapped which can pose a security risk. We therefore recommend allowing phonebanking only from known mobile phones.
Phonebanking can add additional security mechanisms that are not available on traditional e-banking or mobile banking solutions, or that can complement these: Adding different ways of communication to validate a transaction always strongly adds security. For example, visiting a branch office with a passport, and sending a mail. Or making a phone call and receiving/ reconfirming an SMS. Or executing an e-banking transaction and validating through Voice or SMS.
In addition to having a new channel (voice), phonebanking also offers a mechanism for customer authentication, by using bimethric voice "fingerprints".
Interested? Contact us via chat for a free online WWW-based demonstration of Phonebanking Solutions by our consultants!
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