Credit report retrieval system including voice-based interface

A credit data retrieval and reporting system allowing telephone-based access to credit report retrieval functionality, comprising

• a credit data repository maintaining credit history data associated with at least one entity;
• a credit scoring engine operative to receive credit report data relating to an individual or other entity and process the data against a credit scoring model to yield a credit score;
• an off-line mail distribution facility operative to print credit reports and mail the credit reports to users;
• a voice interface server operably connected to a telecommunications network to transmit voice signals to and receive voice signals from voice-based telephone network devices;
• wherein the voice interface server includes call process flow functionality operative to interact with users and generate orders for credit reports;
• a credit data retrieval system operative to:
• interact with the voice interface server to receive a request for credit report data associated with a user;
• access the credit data repository to retrieve credit report data associated with the user;
• access the credit scoring engine to retrieve a credit score based on the credit report data associated with the user;
• transmit the credit score to the voice interface server in response to the request from the user;
• trigger, in response from a request associated with an individual user transmitted by the voice interface server, the off-line mail distribution facility to print out and mail hard copies of credit reports to the individual user;
• wherein the voice interface server comprises a speech recognition engine operative to convert speech received from voice-based telephone network devices to text, a text-to-speech engine operative to convert text data received from the credit data retrieval system to speech;
• and wherein the voice interface server is operative to:
• in response to a command from a user, transmit requests for credit report data to the credit data retrieval system;
• and
• communicate verification that the credit report data has been ordered to the user.

A method facilitating authentication of users over telephone network devices, comprising

• receiving authentication information associated with a user, wherein authentication information includes a plurality of elements, and wherein the plurality of elements includes elements ranging from a most general element to a most specific element;
• authenticating the user by
• prompting the user for information corresponding to the most general element type;
• terminating the authentication, if the information provided by the user does not match the authentication information;
• otherwise, repeating the prompting and conditional terminating steps for the next most general element type until the most specific element type is reached or the authentication is terminated.