Just Say Know to Authentication That Ticks Off Customers
Have you been asked to chime into in your company’s version of “Who are you?” If not, you probably will soon, especially if you’re in a services industry.
More CIOs are facing the need to improve authentication technologies, used to log employees or customers into online systems. Authentication must maintain a difficult balance -- strong enough to keep crooks out, but understandable enough for customers to complete successfully.
One approach, knowledge-based authentication, KBA, is winning over a growing number of customers, like Mellon Investor Services. (Stay tuned to the end of this post for tips on the pros and cons of KBA.)
The basic premise of KBA: To log in, users answer a series of multiple-choice questions, based on public records data about them -- say relating to a real estate purchase -- gathered by a third-party KBA provider. If the user answers the questions correctly, he can log into the system.
For Mellon Investor Services (a subsidiary of Mellon Financial, providing shareholder services and related securities products to small- to Fortune 500-sized firms,) the move to KBA started with a longtime problem, says CTO Marc Librizzi. The firm had a large user population of individual shareholders, and no common data to help authenticate them.
A bottom-line business need drove Mellon to find a new authentication method: Every time someone chooses the call center instead of the web site, it costs the company more money. Sound familiar? “Everyone in a business services environment is trying to drive more self-service transactions,” says Mellon Investor Services CMO Barton Hill.
First, Mellon Investor Services tried a system in 2006 where shareholders logging in for the first time were sent an investor ID via postal mail, then went online to request an access code, which was sent in a second piece of postal mail.
“This really was driven by a security initiative, to prevent fraud and give shareholders a lot of comfort,” Librizzi says. Corporate clients also faced Sarbanes-Oxley pressures, notes Hill, and needed to prove that Mellon, like any number of firms they did business with, was exercising the proper controls with data. But the wait time for customer access codes didn’t go over well.
Volume to Mellon’s related call center went up. “We needed to allow real time access to our system,” Librizzi says.
So Mellon rolled out
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