Best Innovation Group (BIG), Connect Financial Software Solutions (ConnectFSS) and CULedger announced a collaborative partnership today to bring distributed ledger technology (DLT) to BIG’s FIVE Voice Banking Platform.
When ConnectFSS began implementing the FIVE Voice Banking Platform for clients, president Grant Parry saw an opportunity to combine FIVE with work being done on CULedger’s MyCUID digital credential solution. Now, the consortium is working on a new way for members to authenticate during their voice banking transactions, utilizing the security benefits offered by MyCUID’s DLT-based self-sovereign identity platform.
“Voice banking uses devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home to enable members to transact with their financial institutions in a conversational way,” explains John Best, founder and CEO at BIG. “A significant value add when using voice-first interactions for banking is the channel’s inherent ability to reduce the friction that people experience in other channels. The environment should be as secure as possible, but we don’t want to reintroduce a lot of friction into this touchless interface in the process, and today’s security paradigms did not meet our needs.”
“CULedger, Connect FSS and Best Innovation Group have partnered to provide a revolutionary new security solution to the voice banking channel,” said CULedger’s president and CEO, John Ainsworth. “Through our partnership, FIVE’s users are among the first to leverage CULedger’s member-owned, self-sovereign identity capabilities.”
Connect’s clients who implement the FIVE Voice Banking Platform will be the first to have access to this brand new solution. Members will create, store and manage their identity information in the MyCUID solution, which can then be referenced by any service at the credit union that needs to authenticate them. All access to that data is completely controlled by the member themselves.
“Whenever you have an opportunity to increase security while also removing friction from the member experience, it’s a win for all parties involved,” said Connect FSS President, Grant Parry. “This collaboration brings credit unions a better way to identify their members – and the voice channel is a great place to start. We see the MyCUID solution as solving the digital identity problem across all delivery channels and we are excited to play a part in bringing the solution to the market.”
The solution, being announced during this month’s CUNA Government Affairs conference in Washington D.C., will begin a limited production pilot this summer. A preview of the prototype is available here: https://youtu.be/