S1 and Edify Release Voice Banking Solution

ATLANTA - S1 Corporation and its subsidiary Edify Corporation introduced the next generation of its speech application for the financial services industry. The jointly developed voice banking solution gives retail banks and credit unions speech-based ways to automate user authentication, merchant funds verification and branch/ATM locator help without assistance from a live agent.

This speech application is available standalone, known as Edify Voice Banking 2.0, or integrated on the S1 Enterprise Platform, known as S1 Enterprise Voice Banking 2.0. The new solution is one of nine applications of S1 Enterprise.

This voice banking solution gives banks a persona that allows transactions to be completed in self-service. The persona "Kate" is a virtual agent that was developed to come across as knowledgeable and trustworthy.

Based on industry standards such as VoiceXML and SALT, the voice banking application eliminates financial institution's concerns about functionality and compatibility. The application brings together a software platform, application support and voice services. Voice self-service works with questions such as mother's maiden name and date of birth, and enables merchants to verify funds in a customer account at the time of purchase. In addition, banking customers can now ask for the locations of banking branches and ATMs via speech recognition technology.

"As financial institutions continue to add functionality by replacing touch-tone with speech, they are asking how complete the solution is, how easily and completely does it integrate with existing data systems and technology infrastructures, and does it adhere to open-standards support?" said Nancy Jamison, principal analyst at Jamison Consulting. "The joint S1-Edify voice banking solution helps financial firms minimize risk, expedite deployment and reduce total cost of ownership."