Barclays is to roll out voice recognition technology to users of its telephone banking service from next year.
The FreeSpeech voice biometrics system from Nuance allows customers to be identified from their speech patterns without having to give Barclays staff a password.
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Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays personal and corporate banking, said the system was "foolproof".
"You don’t get fraud, and you don’t annoy the customers by asking them to identify themselves with security," he added.
The system is already used by Barclays’ wealth and investment management division, but will be made available to all 12m of Barclays retail banking customers in the UK.
When a customer signs up for voice recognition, they are asked to make a short recording, which is then stored in a secure database.
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By GlobalDataWhen the customer calls Barclays, the technology compares their voice to the recording and can verify their identity in as little as ten seconds, when it will signal this positive identification to the customer agent on the line to the customer.
Currently, customers are asked to provide a 16-digit debit card number or a banking passcode, which can take up to 90 seconds.
Customers who are not able to be identified or who have opted out of the system will have to identity themselves by traditional methods.
FreeSpeech was deployed across Barclays wealth and investment management in late 2012 and proved successful according to customer surveys by the bank.
According to Barclays figures released in 2013, 95% of customers who signed up for voice recognition were successfully verified upon their first use of the system and more than 84% of wealth and investment management customers had signed up.
When asked for feedback on the system, 94% of clients scored at least nine out of 10 for the speed, ease of use and security of voice authentication.
Barclays said it plans to expand the service to corporate customers by the end of 2014, and then to retail customers in 2015.
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