Sorry, not sorry - can’t resist:
Ignore the freezeframe image, it’s actually Blackadder Goes Forth, the episode General Hospital with the ‘German’ spy… should be queued to the relevant section.
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It may not be subjective from the perspective of whatever T1 customer service peon got to deliver the news(and delivered the warning that it might happen).
There has been a lot of enthusiasm about ‘vocal biometrics’ among entities looking to cut authentication costs without turning the call center into a completely trivial attack surface.
Articles about Santander in the UK and voiceprinting seem to be from the past couple of years; though a Santander in Mexico(same corporate parent at least, I’d assume; but am not 100% sure) shows up as a ‘success story’ for Nuance’s " VocalPassword" product back in 2010.
Please don’t construe this as a defence; it’s a classic “the algos are, like, objective, man(because they were written by a bunch of tech bros and trained against what they would think of as ‘normal’ people)” case; I’d just not be at all surprised if the original warning was delivered in good faith (at the not-terribly-helpful level of support peon) because they’d seen “the system” start locking people out like this before; and the trigger is an adoption, much higher up the food chain, of a cost-saving measure that was either not designed with this user group in mind(or deliberately defined it out of scope during development; however hard voiceprinting is I can only imagine that it’s harder if you also try to ensure that people whose voices are changing remain tagged as the same person without ruining your spoof resistance; and defining away hard cases is a classic approach to success).
In most respects, that’s worse: some asshole employee with an axe to grind against the transgendered would need to be dealt with; but would be a problem you could fire. Company-wide adoption of “biometrics means ‘something you are’; and are secure++!” means that a rigid concept of “something you are” being a presumptively immutable thing that you’d best not try to tamper with if you don’t want all kinds of trouble is being baked into the invisible foundational assumptions of the system; where it will have wider impact and be much harder to dislodge.
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