Our Patents

Granted Patents

Eckoh Patents

CallGuard Remote

With COVID-19 crisis, organizations have been striving to maintain serving their customers to the same standard, where most of the workforce has begun home-working or working at a remote location. CallGuard Remote (previously CallGuard Onsite) eliminates sensitive card data from telephone conversations before they are recorded. It can also prevent contact center agents working in the office or remotely from seeing any card data onscreen, or hearing any card details, which minimizes the potential for fraud or theft. The solution removes call recordings, screen recordings and agents from the scope of a PCI DSS audit.

Secure Proxy

This enables an organization to fully de-scope itself from any type of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), without any change in its IT processes. Crucially, companies can continue using their existing tools for telephone, web, or web chat payments, with any sensitive personal data being automatically replaced with placeholder data. The placeholder data is anonymous and cannot be reversed or decrypted to reveal the original sensitive information. As a result, the risk of fraud and the impact of a potential data breach is minimized because there is no longer any sensitive data stored in a company’s environment. Essentially, there is nothing meaningful for criminals to steal.

The secure proxy approach is used in CallGuard, Eckoh’s market-leading secure payment solution. CallGuard automatically replaces payment data or other sensitive data such as Social Security Numbers with ‘placeholders’, prior to it entering an organization’s contact center or IT environment.

The secure proxy approach de-risks a client’s sensitive data and is deployed over their existing IT infrastructure without the need to make any changes to it. Eckoh’s ChatGuard product (the first to be offered globally by a Level One PCI DSS Service Provider) uses this method to secure any existing chat session, irrespective of supplier, and allow it to take payments securely.

Authenticating User for Data Exchange (Customer Authentication)

An innovative authentication concept that offers merchants an even more secure way to take a payment on a phone call where it is more difficult to verify that a caller is the genuine cardholder.

Eckoh’s new process uses both voice biometrics to authenticate a caller, and a phone ‘footprint’ to authenticate the caller’s mobile device. The dual authentication mechanism increases the merchant’s confidence that the caller is the genuine cardholder.

Today, a fraudster may be in possession of stolen card details (including the 3-digit security code on the reverse of most cards), but they are highly unlikely to pass a voice biometric check and also to be calling from the cardholder’s own mobile phone. As such, Eckoh’s approach, significantly reduces the risk of fraud.

Session Handoff

A ground-breaking new technology innovation that underpins Eckoh’s expansion of its Omnichannel customer engagement portfolio.

An online personal shopper offering is an example of how this solution can work. While a customer is browsing a company’s website, they may have a question about a particular product. If they contact the company’s contact center, an agent can securely link to and ‘take control’ of the customer’s browsing session. This allows the agent to upsell complementary products or highlight special offers and actually add them to the customer’s basket. In effect, the agent is acting as an online personal shopper. Once the basket is complete, the agent can then ‘hand back’ the session to the customer who retakes control of the transaction by completing the payment securely. As the agent and contact center are not involved in the payment process, no card data enters the contact center environment, which therefore remains out of scope for PCI DSS.

Contact Center Authentication

A revolutionary technology that ensures customers are securely authenticated prior to talking with contact center agents. As well as saving time and improving data accuracy, the contact center authentication approach can dramatically improve security.

When a customer phones a contact center, a message is sent to their mobile device. The caller authenticates their identity using an existing mainstream authentication method, such as PayPal, Facebook or Amazon. After giving permission to share their information with the contact center, the call is connected to an available agent, who can immediately see relevant information, and greet the customer appropriately. For authentication methods that retain billing and mailing addresses, such as PayPal, the contact center CRM systems can be pre-populated, ensuring no re-typing by an agent – a large time saving, and a significant improvement in data accuracy. Finally, because the caller has already authenticated themselves against, say, PayPal’s login process, the contact center agent can be very certain that they are talking with the actual person the caller claims to be.

Reverse Contact Center Authentication

When a customer receives a call from an organization that they fear may not be genuine, such as a bank seeking to verify some transactions, their only real option currently is to hang up, call back on the number they know to be legitimate and start the conversation from scratch – wasting time for both the agent and customer.

With Eckoh’s newly patented solution the caller can verify the identity of the representative that has called them by clicking on a link, either from the organization’s publicly available website or their app. If the customer is already logged in — or chooses to do so — the page will immediately confirm that an agent is on a call with them based on their registered contact details. This also validates the customer to the agent and provides a secure channel through which they can share information. Alternative approaches to the ‘log in’ option include verifying via other common methods such as entering a one-time pin.

Syntec Patents

Blocking Middle Digits

This format of protecting both voice and data not only secures sensitive information captured via DTMF, including the elimination of the risks of DMTF bleed, but also guards against a situation where a customer accidentally speaks their sensitive information aloud while on a call.

As such, there is no risk of DTMF bleed, agents hearing any card data, or the accidental capture of sensitive data by call recording software.

This is a supporting patent for Eckoh CallGuard Remote, further enhancing our portfolio of protection while remaining easy to integrate with existing contact center systems and architecture.

Secure Speech Capture and Recognition

An innovative method for handling captured speech, where any type of sensitive data is needed - not only for payment details. By randomly distributing chunks of captured audio between multiple independent recognition processors, sensitive speech data can be handled even more securely.

This also introduces the possibility of opening a wider selection of speech recognition engines which would not usually be deemed viable for the handling of sensitive data processing. It even allows for the possibility of having more challenging audio quality be handled by human agents, without the associated risks of fraud or a data breach coming into play.

SIP Info

A highly scalable way of capturing sensitive details, such as payment card data or Account Clearing House information, using the industry-standard SIP INFO method of DTMF handling.

Because of its scalable nature, it also allows for more cost-efficient resiliency to be implemented when compared with other methods.

Accessing information from an Internet user web session

A method of uniquely identifying both callers and agents as they move from web-based interaction through to telephony, that can underpin a wide variety of powerful capabilities.

In this era of customer experience being synonymous with retention and brand perception, it’s more important than ever to exceed the expectations of both your customers and your team. Having the ability to empower your agents with the knowledge of where a caller was when they got stuck in their journey through your website, or whether they have already agreed to your terms and conditions, not only provides reassurance to your customers in your agents' abilities, but can also significantly reduce handling times and caller frustration.