Nexidia, the leading speech analytics provider, joins forces with data
security experts Semafone to address the security of both past and future
credit card recordings
RICHMOND, U.K. – 23 NOVEMBER 2009 – Nexidia, the market-leading provider of
audio search and speech analytics solutions, and Semafone, the UK’s contact
centre payments security experts, today announced an innovative partnership
to address fraud and identity theft in the contact centre environment. With
the tightening of security controls on the high street and online, the
contact centre is now seen by fraudsters as the next ‘easy option’. The
huge volumes of credit card details being recorded and stored daily in
contact centres across the globe make it a prime target for organised
fraudsters.
The partnership between Nexidia and Semafone will ensure that past and
future credit card details are inaccessible by contact centre staff.
Semafone’s unique technical solution delivers secure voice transactions
during the live call and ensures no new credit card details are stored,
while historical voice recordings of credit card numbers can be quickly
located within the vast stores of an organisation’s recorded data using
Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) solution and easily redacted.
This combined solution tackles card fraud and identity theft in contact
centres with an innovative approach that keeps customer data secure. It
helps protect brand integrity, improves peace of mind and customer
satisfaction, and lowers the cost of compliance.
Tim Critchley, managing director at Semafone states, “This combined total
solution is a very timely offering to the contact centre marketplace. It
addresses a major issue for any organisation with a contact centre taking
customer payments over the phone. We are delighted to be partnering with
Nexidia whose responsiveness to changing market demands closely mirrors our
own.”
With the introduction of new Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards
(PCI DSS), which are currently being imposed on the contact centre industry,
companies need new methods for dealing with the sensitive authentication
data-which includes the CAV2/CVC2/CVV2/CID/CW numbers-that are passed during
a transaction. The Semafone solution makes paying by phone secure by
ensuring that no card information is ever seen or heard by the contact
centre agent. The agent and caller are never disconnected from each other,
and are able to talk freely throughout the card transaction. This is
achieved using SecureMode, which allows the call – and critically, the call
recording – to continue as normal whilst the customer enters their credit
card information using their phone keypad. For complete security, Semafone
masks the DTMF digits entered by the caller so they are never heard by the
contact centre agent nor recorded on the call recording system.
Existing call recording systems record all voice traffic and most
organisations keep their recordings for many years; indeed Financial
Services Authority (FSA) regulations stipulate the retention of call
recordings for seven years, which can amount to millions of transactions.
Adherence to the PCI DSS for these organisations and the extraction of
credit card references in this vast store of data presents a major
challenge. With a reputation for delivering the most powerful, flexible and
affordable speech analytics solutions in the market, Nexidia ESI enables
customers to quickly extract deep and meaningful business intelligence
directly from their recorded contact centre interactions. Based on years of
research, Nexidia’s proprietary phonetic search engine indexes 100% of the
call content and creates the most accurate index possible for any spoken
content, which ensures users can quickly and comprehensively locate key
credit card references in their stored data.
“Nexidia’s proven ability to accurately search vast volumes of call
recordings, coupled with
Semafone’s innovative secure transaction software, provides a formidable
solution that addresses not only the pressing compliance issues but also the
industry credibility issues that are rapidly arising from this perceived
‘easy option’,” states Jonathan Wax, vice president of EMEA Nexidia. “We
are delighted to be partnered with Semafone in addressing fraud in the
contact centre. The pressing need, especially in financial services,
provides us with a major inroad into this key market sector.”
Nexidia ESI is the market leading speech analytics solution that delivers
reliable and meaningful business intelligence with the lowest total cost of
ownership. Nexidia’s OnDemand service can be implemented without complex
infrastructure changes, costly upgrades or additional investment in hardware
or software. Being platform-independent, it can instantly access call
recording data no matter what the legacy recording platform. This gives an
excellent technological fit with the Semafone solution which also runs on an
independent telephony platform that can be used regardless of the call
recording or telephony systems already in place.
About Nexidia
Nexidia is the audio and video search company with patented technologies and
breakthrough applications that enable customers to quickly gain new insight,
build competitive advantage and realise the amazing possibilities now
discoverable in audio and video content from contact centres, media outlets,
government intelligence and legal discovery. For more information, please
visit www.nexidia.com.
About Semafone
Semafone was founded in 2009 by a number of call centre professionals who
created the Semafone solution to tackle the compliance requirements
experienced by UK outsourced call centre providers. It has strategic
partnerships with two of the UK’s leading outsourcers Careline Services and
BeCogent and provides services to several of their clients including
Specsavers and Manchester Airports Group. Semafone is in use in a number
of call centres across a variety of sectors including retail, services,
travel and government. For more information, please visit: www.semafone.com
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