Pay By Voice and other “latest and greatest” in the biometrics arena

Implications: It may be difficult for online retailers to implement this new technology without alienating customers and losing sales. Merchants may not have enough incentive to implement such technology because their current fraud losses may not be significant enough to introduce a solution that is unfamiliar to their customers.

Analysis: I found a technology review article earlier this week on “Pay By Voice,” a voice authentication solution for a variety of uses—eCommerce mCommerce online banking mobile banking etc. etc.

While this is a “technology review” article and is interested in reviewing the technology itself, my thoughts are focused more on the feasibility of voice auth above and beyond whether it works, more so whether it will be adopted by institutions and accepted by consumers. Voice Pay claims to be different and better than past voice authentication mechanisms…”You will always get false matches,” says [Vance] Harris [CTO at Voice Vault—the technology provider to Pay By Voice]. But the accuracy of the engine at this stage makes them so improbable that the system is more secure than existing payment systems, he says.

I’m really not worried about that. I just don’t see how online retailers, for example, are going to implement this with the danger of alienating customers and losing sales. Are fraud losses high enough for them to implement such a solution that may be unfamiliar to their customers? I suppose that the company is going after users (it has built a self-stated user base of about 120,000) at the same time it is trying to link with merchants. But as we’ve seen with past solutions that will only take you so far, and much of the registration of new users has got to come from established customer relationships that these merchants (or banks, or other…) have with individuals. It’s just not a recipe for success…