Month: February 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has required industries across sectors re-evaluate and re-imagine their day-to-day operations, and the banking industry is no exception. From temporarily shutting down bank branches to redeploying the staff and provisionally suspending certain services to customers, banks have had to fast track digitisation and were under tremendous pressure to move services online and embrace digital transformation even in rural / semi-rural areas. In this time, with rapid changes in technology advancement and security needs, it is vital for sectors to keep updated on the latest and upcoming technologies to create the best and secured offerings. Innovations amidst protection and safety can lead us towards new revolutions, thereby helping us explore new tech integrations and cross-platform functionalities.

The proliferation of digital access has made the world more connected than ever before. Having flexibility to interface on their own terms anyplace, anytime is possible with the availability of technology at fingertip devices and global access points. As today’s complex digital environment continues to evolve at break-neck speed, privacy and security have become key concerns. It is often said that fraudsters are sometimes multiple steps ahead of service providers! When dealing with hard earned money, needless to add, the demands on privacy and security get heightened. Therein comes the role of safe, secure and convenient authentication.

Both banks and customers benefit as fingerprint, iris and facial recognition technologies become more mainstream in financial services. Stronger customer authentication, the ones including biometric technologies are rapidly becoming a part of the daily life of people around the world. In fact, one of the key reasons why biometrics made it to the top of mobile banking technology trends this year is that other security measures are losing their popularity among customers. Through integration with mobile devices, many interact with some form of biometric authentication daily. Interestingly, a lot has happened in the last couple of years to pique consumers’ interest in biometrics for payments. This has helped to not just familiarise consumers with biometrics but also encouraged them to favor biometrics over more traditional password or pattern recognition authentication techniques.

With multiple options available for biometric identification, banks should choose to mimic multi-factor authentication that requires users to provide a combination of biometric identifiers to reduce the chances of frauds even further. As popularly said, “One biometric doesn’t fit every situation”. For example, if at times while working in the kitchen or driving a car, finger authentication would be impossible, voice or face could easily and safely step in to enable convenience in banking transactions. The prevalence of digital banking and remote banking requires new and convenient ways to authenticate customer identity. Even though bank customers agree with the need for security, they do not want to undergo excessive authentication before they can accomplish the simplest transactions in their own account. With that kind of innovative, customer-focused thinking taking place at institutions across the country, it is clear that mobile banking is entering a new era of security and convenience.

Biometrics offer many advantages to both the financial institution and the consumer; some of them include, lower operational costs, avoidance of complex passwords and PINs, duplicate authentication, no possibility to exploit stolen information obtained from a malicious data breach etc. With multiple, distinctive, and measurable human characteristics that uniquely identify an individual, there is very little or no room for error in protecting this customer data and preventing it from becoming compromised or lost. It is in best interest of the banking and financial institutions to partner with market leaders in biometric technologies and security to ensure that biometrics in banking can achieve its potential and lead to a fraud-proof future.

In today’s digital world, biometric identification technologies are advancing quickly that it has become challenging to predict what they will look like in a few years. However, one thing that can be assumed quite confidently is passwords that were tricky to use, change, and remember will be a thing of the past. After a year of revving and redefining the engines, 2021 will be the year when biometrics in payments steps up a gear. It does have the potential to mitigate several concerns and challenges facing the payments world today.

The future of biometric security will lie in simplicity, universality, cost effectiveness and convenience.

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