6 US banks buttonholed on voice biometrics by chair of Senate banking panel

A consequential U.S. senator wants executives from six of the largest banks in the country what they are doing to prevent deepfake voice fraud. The subtext is Sen. Sherrod Brown thinks banks are just hoping for the best.

Brown is the chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, and he appears alarmed at reports that people are doing some white-hat hacking with AI-generated voices.

The banks getting his questionnaire are JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and TD Bank.

A reporter for The Wall Street Journal and another for the online news publisher Vice reportedly have fooled their banks’ biometric ID verification software with synthetic voices.

In his letter, Brown says, “financial institutions continue to market voice authentication as safe and reliable without identifying the risks customers should consider before opting into this service.”

He has a lengthy list of questions that he would like bank executives to answer by May 18.

Brown wants to know how often voice biometric algorithms are reviewed for performance and security. Are customers’ past voice files used to train algorithms? How are voice files safeguarded?

The letter does not mention voice liveness or presentation attack detection, technologies which are deployed specifically to detect recorded audio.

Article Topics

AI  |  banking  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  deepfakes  |  fraud prevention  |  voice biometrics