Virginia Credit Union delights members with secure account access
Voice biometrics improves the member experience and agent satisfaction.
Company profile
Virginia Credit Union (VACU) is in the top ten percent of credit unions in the U.S. with assets of $3.4 billion. VACU has branch offices in Richmond, Fredericksburg, Farmville, and Charlottesville and provides financial services to more than 260,000 member-owners. As a cooperative, VACU is focused on its members’ success and is committed to the communities it serves, returning value to its members through attractive rates, lower fees, and free financial education resources.
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“ I’ve had members tell me how much they love the Voice ID application, because it takes only seconds to verify their identity without all of the questions we used to ask. ”
Kate Hopson
AVP/Manager, Contact Center
Virginia Credit Union
Challenge
- Slow, complex, inefficient authentication processes
- Poor caller experience and use of member dollars
- Increasing sophistication of fraudsters
- Manual processes hurt VACU's innovation message
Solution
- FraudMiner quickly IDs callers and deters fraudsters
- Connects VACU's existing telephony and backend systems to Nuance APIs
- Custom, desktop pop-up window gives agents seamless, in-call verification
Results
- Overall average handle times (AHT) decreased by 37 seconds compared to 2016
- Savings equivalent to 2 full time employees (FTE) per month from reduced AHT
- 79,000+ verified matches in the first year
- Design-to-deployment in under 6 months
Background
As a credit union, the member experience drives everything VACU does, and new ideas about how to better serve members and make the banking experience even more frictionless are always considered—with a careful eye on using credit union resources wisely on behalf of the membership.
VACU cares deeply about the safety and security of its members. Ensuring secure access to accounts is critical, and VACU determined that its agent-driven authentication processes required too much time and relied on easily found information. At the same time, members said it was difficult to remember answers to complex, knowledge-based security questions. VACU wanted to improve this process, going beyond traditional methods like passwords, PINs, and other knowledge-based factors to offer an easier, faster, yet still highly secure authentication.
The credit union receives approximately 3,000 inbound member calls per day and each caller must be authenticated before accessing any account data. Any simplification of the authentication process needed to reduce the number of time agents spent on each call, and needed to be easy for the member without requiring them to learn complex new methods.
VACU also wanted to demonstrate its technology leadership in member-facing systems. As a pioneering member of the credit union technology standards body, CUFX, VACU is a leader in using advanced technology to improve the member experience.
And finally, the VACU team wanted to leverage investments already made in existing IVR technology, extending its value and accelerating ROI by avoiding a full replacement of their current solution.