COVID-19 Will Prompt Face Biometrics Enthusiasm, and Regulations: OneSpan

OneSpan believes that financial institutions should be preparing to meet a wave of new data privacy and protection laws in the next few years. The advice comes courtesy of the company’s first Global Financial Regulations Report, which breaks down some of the most notable regulatory trends in the financial industry. 

In the report, OneSpan attributes the expected regulatory surge to COVID-19 in particular, and to ongoing trends in the financial industry more generally. In regards to the former, the company notes that COVID-19 has pushed people to digital services, which has in turn exposed some of the security gaps that are still present in those services. Companies and governments are now scrambling to close those gaps, while still trying to deliver performance improvements that make for a better overall customer experience.  

“COVID-19 has presented financial institutions with economic and operational challenges and accelerated the need for digital transformation at the same time as the industry grapples with an increasingly complex global regulatory environment,” said OneSpan CEO Scott Clements.

So what are some of the key trends highlighted in the report? According to OneSpan, there will be more and more scrutiny of AI in the next few years, as regulators focus on data protection and try to craft rules that ensure that data is used ethically and transparently. Remote onboarding will also become more common as people switch to digital services and engage with companies across international borders.

That trend will spur a similar interest in facial recognition, which is one of the more popular forms of remote identity verification. The use of facial recognition will create the need for secure standards, with organizations like the NIST and FIDO working to establish trusted frameworks for the use of biometric data. OneSpan also expects Open Banking to become more common, and to see more regulation in the realm of cryptocurrency.

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November 17, 2020 – by Eric Weiss