The Future of Finance: The Roundup

The financial services industry was one of the fastest to embrace digitization and biometric security, and is once again undergoing seismic change as it adapts to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s why June brought The Future of Finance special event at FindBiometrics: it’s more important than ever to look at the trends that have been reshaping this sector, and to project ahead as many of them accelerate.

Less is More

We kicked things off with a simple premise: that The Future of Finance is going to be passwordless, frictionless, and contactless.

That the sector is trending in this direction is already clear. Biometric authentication has been widely embraced, with many in the financial services sector keen to phase out archaic password-based security. These technologies are also helping to reduce friction in the user experience; it’s much easier to log into an online account with a fingerprint scan or a selfie, and behavioral biometrics can add extra security without even being noticed by the end user.

The trend toward contactless solutions, meanwhile, is being dramatically accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant concerns about social distancing, sanitation, and hygiene. Biometric tap-to-pay credit and debit cards are on the way, and remote banking is on the rise.

Mobile Biometric Banking

On that note, our next feature for The Future of Finance delved deeper into the rise of mobile financial services and their use of biometric authentication. Starting with the ascent of the smartphone over the past decade, the feature went on to track the mobile biometrics revolution that has brought technologies like fingerprint sensors and facial recognition to almost every new smartphone hitting the market today.

Now, multimodal authentication systems and selfie-based onboarding solutions are helping to secure financial services firms, transactions, and customer accounts. And, as the feature explains, these kinds of technologies are only becoming more important as the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects drag on. Banks need to facilitate the surging use of remote, digital services that customers are increasingly demanding, and are turning to the solutions offered by state-of-the-art mobile biometrics.

Biometric Reinforcements

Our third feature on The Future of Finance expanded on the cutting-edge biometric technologies that are next in line to go mainstream. While basic authentication mechanisms like fingerprint and face matching have opened the door to post-password security, newer technologies like liveness detection systems and behavioral biometrics offers a second line of defence against fraudsters and other malefactors.

And an extra line of defence is increasingly important. Sophisticated fraudsters have started to figure out how to fool – or spoof – more rudimentary biometric authentication systems, prompting the need for liveness detection solutions that are specifically designed to spot the signs of these kinds of presentation attacks. Fraudsters are also finding ways of taking control of an end user’s account within an online session that has already been authenticated, such as in certain social engineering attacks. Fortunately, behavioral biometrics systems can detect signs of the unusual activity patterns that can signal potential fraud – all without any extra effort from the end user.

These kinds of solutions are available today, and with a growing number of financial services providers recognizing their value, they are quickly becoming an integral part of The Future of Finance.

Building Invincible Trust Chains

The Future of Finance special event didn’t just involve in-depth features – it also brought an expert panel discussion including executives from some of the leading solutions providers in FinTech.

The webinar was held on June 17th, with a recording now available to stream. Titled “Building Invincible Trust Chains With Strong Authentication and ID Verification“, the webinar featured the contributions of BioCatch VP Ayelet Biger-Levin, Nok Nok Labs VP Rolf Lindemann, Onfido CEO Husayn Kassai, and FacePhi CEO JavierMira. And it touched on many of the key issues highlighted in our other features on The Future of Finance – liveness detection, biometric remote enrollment, continuous authentication, and more.

The discussion, as with our other feature coverage for this month’s special event, is well worth the attention of anyone interested to get a peek at what The Future of Finance looks like. At a time of such great uncertainty about what’s in store for the world in the year to come, the future of the financial services industry is, in some ways, remarkably clear and bright.

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The Future of Finance special event is made possible by our sponsors: Onfido, BioCatch, Nok Nok, and FacePhi.

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June 30, 2020 – by Alex Perala