Papua New Guinea Deployment Illustrates Growing Reach of Financial Services Biometrics

“This will help the bank to detect potential duplicate accounts in its databases, and will allow registered customers to easily authenticate on subsequent visits to the bank when they’re seeking to perform actions such as applying for a loan or a replacement bank card.”

As it continues to expand in the industry, biometric security is making its way to the furthest reaches of the financial services sector, as a new deployment helps to illustrate. Papua New Guinea’s Bank South Pacific (BSP) has announced plans to roll out a new biometric registration program for customers in an effort to fight financial fraud.

Starting in December, the bank will ask customers visiting a branch to register the index and middle fingers of both hands, while also providing official identity documents. This will help the bank to detect potential duplicate accounts in its databases, and will allow registered customers to easily authenticate on subsequent visits to the bank when they’re seeking to perform actions such as applying for a loan or a replacement bank card.

Speaking to local news outlet the Post-Courier, the bank’s retail group GM, Paul Thornton, framed the move as both an effort to protect customers against fraud, and to help the bank comply with Know Your Customer regulations.

BSP is Papua New Guinea’s largest bank, but Papua New Guinea, with a population of a little over eight million, is not a particularly large country. With that in mind, the bank’s embrace of biometric customer onboarding offers the latest example of the ongoing boom of financial services biometrics. It also helps to illustrate the growing influence of KYC and AML regulations, which are pushing banks around the world to implement more stringent processes for customer identification, and thereby limiting opportunities for fraudsters and money laundering.

Source: Post-Courier

–

November 28, 2019 – by Alex Perala