The bank will not officially introduce the technology until next month, but it has tested it with its employees to ensure its accuracy, said Vira-anong Chiranakhorn Phutrakul, consumer business manager at Citibank Thailand.

The bank has been granted approval from the Bank of Thailand to deploy voice biometrics after testing convinced the BOT that this technology was capable of preventing fraud.

Thailand is the eighth market in which Citibank has introduced voice-biometrics authentication. Its banks in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam have already implemented the technology.

Vocal-recognition technology extracts personal voice patterns and verifies the speaker’s identity using just those inputs. In essence, it listens to a person’s voice and determines who that person is, according to Citibank.

It is effective against fraud because it has the ability to extract an individual’s voiceprint and to use it to verify the speaker’s identity by comparing it with live speech.

Vira-anong said that under the bank’s security policy, call-centre staff had to ask many questions to authenticate the identity of customers, which could cause them inconvenience. Voice biometrics will help the bank verify customers quickly, securely and accurately.

The first time they encounter the new system, customers will be required to register their voiceprint with the bank’s call centre for identity authentication. She said the technology uses algorithms to compare live voice characteristics those of a previously created voiceprint within 15 seconds.

However, vocal authentication will only be available for basic CitiPhone transactions such as checking credit balances. It will not available for complex transactions such as Citibank’s Click for Cash service or when customers ask the call centre to transfer cash into a savings account, she said.

Last month, Citibank Thailand introduced fingerprint verification for customers who use mobile and Internet banking.