Nexidia and Semafone Partner to Prevent Fraud and Identity Theft in the Contact Centre

Nexidia, the Leading Speech Analytics Provider, Joins Forces with Payments Security Experts Semafone to Address the Security of Both Past and Future Credit Card Recordings

RICHMOND, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--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.

“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.”

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 searched and 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 & 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 call centre agent nor recorded on the contact 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 and 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. With Nexidia’s OnDemand service, it 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 contact centre professionals who created the Semafone solution to tackle the compliance requirements experienced by UK outsourced contact 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.