There is a strong demand in the banking industry for secure biometric applications. In fact, in May 2014 the European Central Bank (ECB) published a list of recommendations for increased banking security and biometrics was included as one of the most secure authentication methods.
Security has always been a major concern of the banking industry because banks are attractive to criminals as a direct access to currency and user´s personal information that can be used for identity theft. Concerns about bank security have always existed, but it has been after the breakthrough of online and mobile banking when bank fraud has become major issue to address with urgency.
Currently, banking authentication is typically done by using 4-6 digits PIN codes. This form of authentication provides an extremely low security, especially in online banking where cybercriminals can hack this PIN code in a matter of seconds. As a result, the total value of fraudulent transactions is rapidly increasing year by year, being now estimated at 1.44 billion solely in Europe.
In this scenario, biometrics holds great promise to become a reference banking authentication method in a near future. Instead of a PIN code, which is something you should remember and can be easily obtained by criminals, biometric authentication is based on those distinctive and measurable characteristics to unequivocally authenticate a person (facial features, iris pattern, fingerprint, voice…). However, despite the clear opportunity there are still some barriers preventing the banking biometrics breakthrough, at least on a large scale.
In the FACCESS Phase 2 project we have demonstrated our facial recognition technology can actually unleash the large-scale deployment of banking biometrics by the implementation of our product in the mobile/online platforms of different international institutions, such as ICBC, HSBC, Banco Santander. FacePhi closes this year with 30 banks in production, more than 6M of users of the technology and more than 500M of authentications during 2018.
