Cyberphunkz Tech Blog

MOSCOW – Russia’s biggest retail bank is testing something that the old K.G.B. might have loved, an automated teller machine with a built-in lie detector intended to prevent consumer credit fraud.

New customers could talk to the machine to apply for a credit card, with no human intervention required on the bank’s end.

The machine scans a passport, records fingerprints and takes a three-dimensional scan for facial recognition. And it uses voice-analysis software to help assess whether the person is truthfully answering questions that include “Are you employed?” and “At this moment, do you have any other outstanding loans?”

The voice-analysis system was developed by the Speech Technology Center, a company whose other big clients include the Federal Security Service – the Russian domestic intelligence agency descended from the Soviet K.G.B.

Dmitri V. Dyrmovsky, director of the center’s Moscow offices, said the new system was designed in part by sampling Russian law enforcement databases of recorded voices of people found to be lying during police interrogations.

The big bank involved, Sberbank, whose majority owner is the Russian government, said it intended to install the machines in malls and bank branches around the country, but had not yet scheduled the rollout. Technology consultants say it would be the banking world’s first use of voice analysis in automated teller machines.

It was the global financial crisis, partly prompted by loans that people could not or would not repay, that prompted Sberbank to tap Russia’s national security experts as it set out to automate banking activities, said Victor M. Orlovsky, a senior vice president for technology at the bank.

The software detects nervousness or emotional distress, possible indications that a credit applicant is dissembling. That information, Mr. Orlovsky said, would be used in combination with other data, including credit history.

Sberbank says that to comply with Russian privacy law, the bank plans to store customers’ voice prints on chips contained in their credit cards rather than on a central database.

In addition, Mr. Orlovsky said the bank planned to make consumers aware of the types of information, including biometrics, that the machine would be collecting. But the technology center says even people who know about the voice-stress program would have trouble fooling it.

One of the center’s other products measures anger and is already installed at the telephone call center of the Russian national railways.

“We are not violating a client’s privacy,” Mr. Orlovsky said.

“We are not climbing into the client’s brain. We aren’t invading their personal lives. We are just trying to find out if they are telling the truth. I don’t see any reason to be alarmed.”