Financial advisors and their clients will spend less time answering security questions when they have account inquiries with Toronto-based Manulife Financial Corp., as the company launches new voice-recognition technology that’s designed to enhance security and improve efficiency.

Manulife announced on Tuesday the rollout of a new interactive voice response system that enables advisors and customers to access their accounts via phone through voice recognition software, rather than using passwords, pins and security questions.

“We certainly know from market research and customer feedback that we’ve gotten that having to know your passwords and answering security questions and all of those types of things that come with the authentication process is one of the leading pain points that a number of customers actually have,” said Marianne Harrison, president and CEO of Manulife Canada, who announced the new system at Manulife’s Toronto headquarters on Tuesday.

“Manulife is the first company in Canada to launch an integrated voice response system where we’re bringing both the natural language understanding and voice biometrics together in both English and French,” she said. “It gives our Canadian customers access to their accounts by only using their voice. So, no more pins, no more passwords, no more security [questions]. It is your voice that actually gets recorded, and that is your password to get into the system.”

The technology also recognizes callers’ spoken instructions, in order to route them quickly to the individual who can provide assistance.

The new system has been available to retail advisors and Manulife Bank customers since July, and is now being rolled out to all Manulife customers in Canada. Manulife’s customer call centre receives approximately 28,000 phone calls each day, according to Harrison. As a result, the technology is expected to lead to significant efficiencies for the company.

The system is particularly useful for those advisors — and their support staff members — who make frequent calls to Manulife to place new business, check on existing business, or get product information, Harrison said.

“From an advisor perspective, it helps them to get more focused and get to where they want to get to quicker,” Harrison said.

Specifically, the system prevents advisors from having to go through a user-verification process, which can take up to four minutes every time they make a call, according to Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of Burlington, MA-based software company Nuance Communications, Inc., which partnered with Manulife to develop the system.

“It’s really about making it quick, and eliminating that authentication process and making it faster,” Harrison said.

The voice recognition technology is also more secure compared with asking users security questions, Harrison added, since the answers to those questions could potentially be obtained by a third party.

“The technology analyzes more than 100 unique characteristics, so it’s almost like a fingerprint,” she said.