Financial Biometrics Month: Fresh Business Models and Next-Gen Infrastructure

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal in late 2008. Acting as the White House Chief of Staff at the beginning of the Great Recession, Emanuel was trying to say that the financial crisis offered an opportunity to ask some big questions about how markets are structured and to think about dramatic changes that could make things better in the long term.

Today, as much of the world enters the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of banks and other financial services organizations are asking the same kinds of questions. It’s a good time to look at fresh business models and next-gen infrastructure, and many are turning to biometric solutions to address new and intensified challenges.

Securing the Call Center

In our first feature for Financial Biometrics Month, we looked at how selfie-based authentication solutions and behavioral biometrics technologies were being used by financial services organizations to secure digital channels. These are critically important security measures at a time when lockdown restrictions and concerns about contagion are pushing troves of bank customers into digital channels. But the pandemic has also had the effect of spiking volumes in the call center channel.

This is another area where next-gen security infrastructure is being embraced, and many organizations are looking to the advantages of voice biometrics for their own solutions. Voice recognition can be used to verify the identity of a given caller through their biometrics alone, eliminating the need for the kinds of question-and-answer security processes that are usually implemented in telephonic channels. Nuance Communications, for example, offers a solution that lets customers record voiceprints that can be used for subsequent authentication – a solution that was embraced by the National Australia Bank in May. Meanwhile, NICE’s Real-Time Authentication was recently deployed by Alfa-Bank Russia to allow the organizations to identify customers passively during natural call center conversations.

ATM Innovation

Another opportunity for a fresh approach to next-gen infrastructure lies in the customer touchpoint of ATMs. This is one area that has remained stubbornly resistant to innovation over the years, with most ATMs maintaining PIN-based security even as biometric authentication options have proliferated across digital and mobile channels. But there are signs of growing excitement about biometric ATMs amid the pandemic – especially those that enable contactless authentication.

Earlier this year, ATM manufacturer Hyosung integrated Fujitsu’s PalmSecure palm vein scanning technology into multiple self-service devices. Any banks that decide to embrace this solution will be able to offer their customers the ability to access ATMs through a touchless hand scan, enhancing security, safety, and convenience. And in the summer, NEC teamed up with HSM specialist Futurex to bring face-based authentication to ATMs – another touchless approach to ATM access. Likewise for the recent partnership between Trust Stamp and OneBanks, whose banking kiosks will integrate Trust Stamp’s face authentication technology.

At this stage, there still hasn’t yet been an explosion of biometric ATMs. But the activity among solutions providers offers a signal that they anticipate demand as the ongoing pandemic continues to prompt more financial services organizations to consider alternative approaches to business and infrastructure. On that note, there’s also good reason to expect a growing uptick in the use of voice recognition for call center security. And then there’s the skyrocketing demand for the other authentication and anti-fraud technologies we’ve previously discussed, with a number of banks implementing selfie-based authentication and behavioral biometrics across mobile and digital channels.

It’s all part of the effort to look at fresh business models and next-gen infrastructure during a time of crisis. A growing number of leaders in the financial services space don’t want to let this opportunity go to waste.

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Financial Biometrics Month is presented in association with Money20/20 and made possible by our sponsors: Onfido, FacePhi, and BioConnect.

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October 22, 2020 – by Alex Perala