Last week, BBC Click reporter Dan Simmons reported that he had been able to fool HSBC’s biometric voice recognition system by passing his brother’s voice off as his own.

What Happened?

In an experiment that was filmed for the BBC Click technology digest TV programme, Mr Simmons initially set up an account with his own voice password, and then allowed his non-identical twin brother Joe to use the voice recognition account access procedure.

Despite claims that voice recognition is secure because of the unique aspects of each person’s voice, Joe’s voice was wrongly identified and authenticated as being Dan’s, and Joe was then granted access to his brother Dan’s bank account.
This granted him access to transfer and withdraw funds from the account, although this was not actually attempted.

Seven Attempts

Quite apart from the worrying fact that the voice recognition system could be fooled (albeit by a twin), the security procedure actually allowed the twin seven attempts before finally accessing his brother’s account using only his voiceprint.

Introduced By HSBC Last Year

Voice recognition software has been around for some years and was rolled out by Barclays in 2013. Other High Street Banks followed suit, with the expectation that by the end of this year, millions of banking customers will be using it.
A voice–based security system was first introduced by HSBC in 2016, and was designed to quantify 100 different attributes and traits of the human voice, used to validate a user’s identity.

When accessing HSBC and other High Street banking systems, a customer only needs to give their date of birth, account details, and then the command “My voice is my password”.

As each person’s voice is unique and always available (unless you’ve lost your voice of course), the system should be able to recognise a voice on the first attempt.

How It Works

In the same way that your fingerprint is unique, your voice is totally individual to you. Hackers and fraudsters may use their resourcefulness to guess or steal your passwords and PINs, but it should be impossible for your voice to be replicated.
Voice ID systems work by checking more than 100 physical and behavioural voice peculiarities, including the emphasis you place on certain words, the shape and size of your mouth, plus other less known physical and behavioural individualities.

HSBC To Increase Security

As a result of the recent “twin” findings, HSBC has now said that it intends to intensify the sensitivity of the software. Despite their discomfort of being duped by a BBC reporter and his twin, security experts still uphold that biometric voice recognition is undoubtedly a more effective and more secure means of accessing your bank account than using more traditional passwords.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The stubbornly high levels of cyber crime, as highlighted by many high-profile attacks including the recent WannaCry ransomware attack have led businesses to give greater priority to cyber and data security. Businesses would like (and expect) trusted institutions, such as banks, to give their security (on and offline) a very high degree of priority.

Some banks have notoriously old IT systems though, and many banks have been subject to attacks in recent times e.g. when money was actually taken from 9,000 Tesco current accounts earlier this year.

Password verification / authentication is known to be less secure than multi-stage and biometric security systems. A YouGov / GMX study back in August 2016, however, showed that UK people have a number of trust concerns about biometrics ranging from concerns about the providers to the technology itself.

Even though biometrics should be much more secure in theory, this report of a failure of a seemingly foolproof system will do nothing to improve the trust that business and home customers have in biometric banking security systems. Despite trust issues however, many customers accept that biometrics are still an important next step to beat the fraudsters, and that the loophole uncovered now in the voice-recognition system could mean that this avenue is now closed to fraudsters.

If the new automated ‘text to switch’ plan comes to fruition, mobile phone customers will be able to ditch their current provider just by sending them a text.

What’s The Problem?

Delivering exceptional customer service is now a key differentiator in business, and companies that don’t go the ‘extra mile’ quickly find they lose customers to those that do.

Ensuring customer satisfaction however, does not seem to be a high priority in every sector of the economy. Utilities and telecommunications are often considered to be behind the game when it comes to adequately servicing their customers.

If you’ve ever tried to move your mobile contract to a new provider will know how difficult this can be. The process often seems overly complex, with numerous contract stipulations that make trying to change a costly and difficult experience.

In fact, around 2.5 million of us who have tried to switch or cancel a contract encountered at least one major difficulty when doing so. As a result, many phone users stay with their current mobile provider, and endure less than ideal service, rather than go through the trauma of moving to another.

Dumped By Text

After putting forward plans earlier this year to automatically compensate customers who experience slow broadband repairs or missed appointments by engineers, phone regulator Ofcom, has now turned its attention to the mobile phone industry.

If Ofcom’s proposals become reality however, then in future mobile phone customers will be able to dump their current provider just by sending them a text. No more tortuous calls to someone who seems intent on doing all they can to make it as difficult as possible for you to leave.

Under Ofcom’s new automated ‘text to switch’ plan once a provider receives your ‘goodbye text’ they must text back information about any termination fees, outstanding handset costs and account balance.

Supply PAC Code In One Working Day

Most importantly, your newly dumped ‘ex’ provider will have to supply the Porting Authorisation Code (PAC), needed by your new provider, who will also be obligated to get you up and running as a customer within just one working day!

No Additional Charges

Under the Ofcom plan, phone providers would also be prevented from making additional charges after your switch date. Collectively, this could save Britain’s mobile users around £10m every year.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For the 93% of us who own or use a mobile phone, this can only be good news. Mobile communications are now vital to modern businesses, and the quality, content and pricing of the mobile services offered by providers to businesses can be an important factor in the competitiveness of those businesses.

Business customers being able to switch more quickly and easily should, therefore, motivate mobile phone companies to improve their customer service, and provide services that add more value for lower prices.

For many businesses broadband speed is an important issue, and for example, A 10-week public consultation is to be held by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Committees of Advertising Practice (CAP) about the advertised speeds of competing broadband services and whether they differ from real user experiences.

The recent introduction of ‘Voom Fibre’ from Virgin Business, which offers SMEs the chance to benefit from a broadband speed of 350Mbps, is just the sort of thing that is likely to trigger switching by many businesses.

Back in October 2015, Google announced that it was introducing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in order to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. In May 2017, AMPs are still attracting criticism and the accusation that Google may be the only real beneficiary.

What Are AMPs?

Accelerated Mobile Pages are ‘light-weight’ web pages that are designed using existing technologies e.g. faster, optimized HTML and a faster Google page caching system, to allow them to work across multiple platforms and devices. The idea is that, even if web pages have rich content like video, animations and graphics, AMPs will be able to load instantaneously (alongside smart ads) on phone, tablet or mobile devices of all types.

What’s The Problem?

AMP has been designed for speed and simplicity, and as such, critics of the initiative have said that the limited layout options make AMP web pages appear rather undistinguished and bland.

Also, if your website hasn’t been professionally made, for example, Google isn’t able to cache your coded AMP Web pages unless they’re guaranteed free of HTML errors.

Critics also say that, if more people create pages in AMP, they are optimized specifically for Google, and are, therefore, locked-in to Google (rather like Google’s own version of Facebook). This could be construed as being rather the opposite of ‘open’.

Rather than having your own detailed analytics data for your web pages, using AMP also means that you can only have access to a small subset of the data that Google gathers. This could therefore give you a less informed view of your online business.
Other critics have also pointed out that the stripped-out, uniform appearance of AMP (everything looking the same in AMP), and the endorsement of Google means that AMP could be open to abuse by those looking to spread fake news, or to publish (potentially high ranking) low-quality content.

Advantages of using AMP

Despite drawing a large amount of criticism, there are reports to show that mobile websites are able to appear on devices at almost instant speeds and up to 85% faster than standard mobile pages.

In addition to racking up shares and views, AMP could also ensure that more people will read your content. It is important to make the point, however, that AMP pages are likely to get higher priority in Google’s mobile search than other web pages.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Back in October 2016 StatCounter figures showed the mobile access overtaking desktop for the first time with 51.3% of global web traffic accessing the web using smart-phones and tablets. Just a look at your own website analytics should confirm that most of your business website visitors are likely to be using mobiles and tablets. It is therefore important to have pages which rank well in mobile search and load quickly onto mobile devices (in under 3 seconds if possible). AMP appears to offer these benefits but it seems that these may be offset slightly by having to present relatively bland-looking pages to potential customers, risking getting too locked-in to Google, and forgoing some important analytic insights.

It is still relatively early days for AMP, and it is in Google’s interest to ensure that the criticisms by businesses and technical commentators are heeded so that more businesses choose to use AMP.

Your phone rings and you pick up. Instead of a warm voice on the other end, you get the cold, robotic tones of an automated message trying to sell you something you probably don’t want. So, how can you make sure that your mobile is protected from disruptive and potentially costly cold-calls?

Record Fine

Unsolicited sales calls are known as ‘cold calls’, and they are something that millions of mobile phone owners are all-too-familiar with.

One piece of recent news that may warm the hearts of anyone who has been plagued by calls asking about the details of a road accident that you may have been involved in is news that a record fine of £400,000 was issued to a company called Keurboom for making nuisance calls of that kind to nearly 100 million people!

Know Your Rights – Report Callers To The ICO

Most people have resigned themselves to receiving the occasional irritating call but the truth is that these calls are actually illegal.
Keurboom received the fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) because commercial automated calls or text made to you without consent are against the law.

Over 1000 (only a fraction of the total calls made) of the people who were repeatedly called by Keurboom late at night made complaints to the ICO.

If you are harassed by unsolicited automated calls, reporting callers to the ICO can be an effective way of stopping the culprits at source, thereby saving us all the trouble of receiving their calls.

Register with the Telephone Preference Service

By registering your landline or mobile number with the Telephone Preference Service, you will have an additional layer of protection against automated cold calls.

After the 28-day processing period, companies will not be allowed to phone you for marketing reasons without prior consent (see the next section for more on this).

If you have already accidentally given company permission or you’ve changed your mind for any reason, contact them directly and ask them to stop doing so. According to the law, they must obey your request.

Registering with the TPS is free and can be easily done online on their website or by calling them at 0845 070 0707.

There are other companies offering a similar service, but they may charge a fee and telemarketers are only required to check with the TPS.

Even though this is a popular and helpful measure you can take, it does not guarantee immunity.

Did You Tick the Right Box?

Reading the fine print is generally a good idea (if you have the time). When you buy something online or sign up for a service or newsletter, always pay attention to the little boxes that are “optional” to tick.

Sometimes ticking them allows the company to share your details with other businesses for marketing purposes, and sometimes it’s the opposite. Occasionally however, boxes can even be pre-ticked for you. If there is more than one box, it could be a combination.

The message is, therefore, take time to read the accompanying print carefully, and to take note of what the ticks (or lack of them) in the boxes actually mean can save you a lot of trouble in the future.

Be Careful When You Reply To Texts

Depending on who the message is from, your reply could encourage more messages.

If you trust the company sending the message or if the sender’s number is a five-digit number, sending a reply with just “STOP” will solve the problem, and prevent you from being charged.

If you do not recognise the sender, then replying can backfire by acting as confirmation that your phone number is valid, thus triggering more automated communication. In this case, the best thing to do would be to just ignore it.

What you can do instead is make a report to your network operator by forwarding the message to 7726, which coincidentally spells SPAM if you type it out on your keypad.

Go Ex-Directory & Keep Your Mobile Number Private

There are a number of ways your number can be obtained. BT has a directory service which allows companies to find telephone numbers and addresses online, over the phone, or in a phone book.

To prevent your number from being listed, make sure to sign up with the optional Ex-Directory scheme.
Opting out of the “edited register” of the electoral roll when you sign up as a voter is another step you can take to prevent having your contact details sold to unscrupulous marketers.

Get the Numbers Blocked

Some network operators offer a service that enables you to block calls from reported numbers, though there may be a fee incurred for the service.

If they do not, you can purchase a call blocker app for your phone that will work for numbers that you “blacklist”. You can check with your provider to see if it is already included in your mobile contract.

File a Complaint

A simple solution may just be to file an official complaint with the offending company.

When asked, the caller must provide the organisation’s name, address or a free phone number for getting in touch with them.
As mentioned earlier, a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) may also prompt the regulator to take action against the marketer (combined with complaints from other people).

If you decide to file a complaint, it may be helpful (though not essential) to make a note of the time and date of the call, the phone number, and the company’s name.

Just Ignore Them

In the unlikely event that you have exhausted all these options to no avail, the only option left would be to screen your calls and be selective as to which calls you choose to answer. The risk is that you may mistake some legitimate calls for nuisance ones, but at least you won’t have to listen to any more sales pitches, and after enough failed attempts, the callers may simply give up.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Time, and keeping your phone free to enable you to receive calls that could actually make you money rather than cost you money, are valuable to businesses. With more of us relying on our smartphones for more aspects of our business, and with more business people being more mobile than ever, taking these kinds of measures to eradicate junk calls from our mobiles is vital. With our mobile number, people also get directly through to us rather than the traditional company ‘gatekeeper’ e.g. the receptionist, so this is another good reason why it’s important to proactively take what steps we can to free-up our mobile time for value-adding, money making calls rather than frustrating, line-blocking, potentially costly calls. Being aware of ways in which our online and offline behaviour could give fuel to junk-callers is therefore necessary, and this subject is a lesson in why taking some time to read the small print (within reason) now could actually make life easier and help us make more effective use of time and make / save money in the future.