Star Performers: Verint Enters the Voice Biometrics Market
Verint Systems has consistently earned high marks for its speech analytics solutions, and in Speech Technology magazine's 2013 awards, Verint tied with Nexidia for the top spot in the speech analytics category. Since then, the company has branched out into new markets, such as voice biometrics, and has dramatically grown its contact center offerings with the acquisition of customer service solutions provider Kana Software.
In a surprising announcement, in October 2013, Verint entered the voice biometrics space with the acquisition of Victrio, a fraud prevention and identity authentication solutions firm. Although Verint had focused its attention on analytics and workforce optimization (WFO) products, the company said it had found synergy with Victrio.
"We're now growing the fraud and risk analytics area of our business," said Ryan Hollenbeck, senior vice president of marketing at Verint, at the time. "While we do things around fraud, like video and ATMs and desktop and process analytics, we didn't have anything in the way of voice biometrics that can help do predictive analysis with callers, especially in the financial services area."
Victrio solutions combine passive voice biometrics with unique predictive analysis that can detect fraudsters and authenticate customers without caller interruption. The company's solution listens to calls in the contact center, passively creates a voice print of the caller based on the content of the telephone interaction, and compares that voice print against a database of known fraudsters.
Nancy Treaster, senior vice president and general manager at Verint, says that Victrio "has a level of success in this space that's beyond just technology. Voice biometrics has been around for a long time, but cracking the code so that it doesn't create more work than it's worth, this is what Victrio brings to the table."
Verint has not abandoned its speech analytics roots and continues to partner with companies in the space. In late 2013, Verint scored a deal with cloud-based contact center services provider inContact. The company's Analytics Driven Quality solution uses Verint's speech analytics, and is now a piece of the newly christened inContact WFO suite. In mid 2014, contact center solutions provider Adtech Global rolled out its Ignite Speech Analytics, using Verint's Impact 360 Speech Analytics. During the same period, Verint struck a partnership with Shanghai Unicom. The subsidiary of Chinese telecommunications carrier China Unicom implemented Verint's Impact 360 Speech Analytics to mine insights from customer calls to improve the customer experience in a highly competitive market.
In January, Verint bought Kana Software for $514 million. Verint said that the on-premises and cloud contact center services provider brought complementary services to the table and would help expand Verint's customer engagement offerings. Using Kana's customer service solutions, such as email, chat, and social media management tools, will help grow Verint products including its WFO solution and its Verint Voice of the Customer Analytics solution, which provides speech and text analytics, voice biometrics, and voice recording capabilities, among other services.