Biometrics reinforcing Financial Security

CFO Tech Outlook | Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Biometrics is the study of distinctive and measurable human characteristics like fingerprints and veins, palm veins, iris, retina, face, and voice. The banking sector is using biometrics widely as it is highly secure, provides privacy, universal, practical and simple.

Banks are putting enormous effort to make banking more secure and convenient than ever before and gaining appreciation from both individual and corporate customers. Majority of young individuals see security measures as an annoying step before making an online payment to then become victims of data breach and online theft. To tackle this problem banking institutions have been using passphrases, social media sign-ins, multiple devices, and even various combinations of those methods with a password for increased security.

Biometric authentication has strengthened or completely replaced outdated passwords and swipe cards. With increasingly sophisticated techniques used by hackers, adopting biometric technology is an operational imperative to financial institutions. The end users also have accepted the technology and believe that biometrics is more secure and convenient

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Why Biometrics

One thing that everyone carries is a mobile phone. A natural transition is using your phone as part of an authentication platform so many financial institutions across the world are investing in mobile biometric authentication for their employees and customers.

Biometrics is strengthening financial transactions by

Compliance

Many new laws have been implemented to protect personal identity and strengthen security. For legislation such as GDPR that require increased transparency – biometrics is an effective way to set up a foolproof audit trail of explicit authentication that can’t be duplicated.

Mobile Banking

Using phones for banking has become universal thanks to biometrics authentication; customers can sign up for accounts in less than a minute and do required transactions with no paperwork.

High-value Trading

Biometrics is a non-denial remedy to significantly reduce trading fraud. Investment firms can use biometrics to authenticate the trader and the trade. By implementing biometrics firms create electronic records of every account session including the person, their IP address and the time of the transaction can be easily tracked¬, leading to a reduction of fraud in trading.

ATMs

Financial institutions are now offering cardless ATM transactions. While this is convenient for customers, these machines are very insecure. Passwords and PINs aren’t safe enough to protect against fraud. To solve this, ATMs are including biometric authentication which requires users to prove their identity by fingerprint or facial recognition in order to access funds

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