FacePhi Biometrics Enable Remote Pension Payments in Argentina

FacePhi’s facial recognition technology is being used to transform the banking experience for pensioners in Argentina. In the past, senior citizens needed to make a visit to a physical branch location in order to collect their monthly pension, due to legislation that was essentially passed as a liveness check to prevent pension fraud.

However, Argentina has opted to relax those regulations, and is now allowing banks to accept a facial recognition scan as a valid form of liveness detection. The decision allows seniors to confirm pension payments and check collection dates without ever leaving their home, through a remote procedure that reduces face-to-face contact during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The use of systems for accessing bank accounts is increasing among older users from different countries, who see this technology as a practical and friendly way to carry out the most common financial operations,” said FacePhi CEO Javier Mira. “This digitization has a positive social impact, especially in the situation of COVID-19, in which it is advisable to prevent older people from going to closed spaces.”

Mira went on to argue that facial recognition is safer than touch-based forms of biometric authentication. Argentinian banks have offered fingerprint authentication, but the technology is only available at the bank and forces customers to make contact with a shared device.

FacePhi, of course, is a leading provider of those kinds of selfie-based onboarding and authentication services. The company has partnered with numerous financial institutions in Argentina, and is continuing to grow its presence with the introduction of pension services. For example, FacePhi technology was deployed in a mobile pension app from the Argentinian bank Supervielle that attracted more than 150,000 users in a matter of months. FacePhi has been providing onboarding technology for Supervielle since April of 2019.

FacePhi has now partnered with roughly a dozen financial institutions in Argentina, with Santander Argentina and Banco de Corrientes signing on as some of the most recent additions to the company’s client roster. The company’s liveness detection technology achieved ISO 30107-3 certification back in June.

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September 28, 2020 – by Eric Weiss