Traditional banks and financial institutions are increasingly directing their efforts towards digitization of their business channels, due to the changing customer demands as well as a growing trend of digital financial services that entail heavy competition in the market, which banks have to eventually face in order to grow.

With more collaborative models and open ecosystems gaining traction in the finance sector, security concerns arise among customers. Today, financial institutions are challenged with two opposing forces that require equal attention when it comes to security and user convenience.

Frederic Ho, VP of Asia Pacific at Jumio, an online mobile payments provider of a variety of online identity verification, authentication and e-KYC regulatory services, recently discussed those two forces in a podcast, as reported by the website Fintechnews Singapore.

The first critical aspect in demand is of course security, where concerns for identity theft, online fraud and account takeover cannot be undersold to consumers. Data breaches are always an impending threat to digital accounts, and Frederic Ho stated that there is a big concern in the industry that this user data can be used to open fraudulent accounts for movement of illegally obtained funds, money laundering purposes and other similar criminal intentions. Therefore, top-notch digital authentication methods are crucial to securing customer accounts across the financial web.

On the other side of the demand spectrum, we find concerns over user experience dilemmas. Security is the critical force at play for digital finance but products & services need to also be intuitive, convenient and fast for consumers to adopt them. For example, banking processes such as onboarding new clients are expected to take minutes, if not seconds. Traditional banks’ expectations of having customers visit their branch or office, queue and wait for traditional processes to take their course are over, as the digital age imposes its requirements of expecting everything to happen easily, securely and instantly.

The finance industry believes that by combining biometrics (such as fingerprints and facial recognition), 3D profiling and selfies may yield one of the most secure approaches to authenticating customers while preventing identity fraud and related criminal activities.

Article Tags
Facial Recognition, Jumio, biometrics, fraud, user experience, security, traditional finance, selfie