At the most recent edition of Future Identity Finance, in London, we chatted to Lee Lambert, Enterprise Account Executive at TeleSign. TeleSign provides two-factor authentication via SMS and through new channels such as Whatsapp and Viber.

Lee explains that TeleSign is also at the forefront of emerging ways to verify customers, such as silent verification. This is a powerful too to address one of the biggest concerns financial institutions are facing today – social engineering.

“Users are socially engineered for codes and then make transactions they didn’t want to make, which cost the banks a lot of money and causes huge emotional distress for customers,” Lee stresses. He also explains that this method creates a much better customer experience too, as two-factor verification can be quite a clunky process for customers whereas silent verification all takes place in the background.

Lee highlights the power of leveraging machine learning and AI to gather insights into user behaviour, in order to streamline customer onboarding and detect fraud.

“The advances of AI and machine learning in the last 5 years has been exponential, there’s patterns there that humans would never recognize, phone number ranges that are being used for fraud, all sorts of interesting insights” Lee says. “This data can be fed into a risk score, so you can see how to treat a customer once you understand the behaviour of that number in the wider world.”

Watch the full interview below for further insights into the evolution of silent verification.

The conversation continues at the Future Identity Festival, November 13th – 14th at The Brewery, London – registration is now open!