Identity Authentication for Banking Operations

Incumbent banking institutions have emerged out of the pandemic to a landscape scattered with innovative FinTech competitors actively trying to poach a bank’s increasingly impatient and disloyal customer base. Banks are already saddled with stringent BSA/AML compliance regulations in the wake of unprecedented levels of internal and external fraud, and so are confronted with the challenge of rapid, necessary innovation all while keeping their house in order and secure.

As mentioned, new types and increased levels of fraud keep a bank’s risk and operations officers up at night, knowing that they’re faced with a nigh impossible balancing act.

To grow its business and onboard new customers, banks first and foremost need to prove that the applicants are truly who they claim they are in order to prevent fraud from entering their books and to meet regulatory requirements. But at the same time, banks (and all financial and ecommerce entitles) can’t make those security checks so difficult or time-consuming that customers abandon the process or transaction altogether.

The Current State of Banking and Breaches

Given today’s competitive landscape, consumers are confident that their banking product / services needs can be met by another faster / smarter / innovative institution.

• In its research, Earnst & Young found that 46% of U.S. consumers had used at least two online financial services in 2019, up from 17% in 2015. Bank customers are diversifying rapidly.
• Customer onboarding expert Fenergo revealed that 36% of financial institutions say they have lost customers due to inefficient or slow onboarding processes.

The considerable conundrum today’s banks face, then, is how to move faster and innovate to appease its existing and potential customer base when massive fraud and security concerns necessarily slow the process down?

• New account fraud costs banks $3.4B annually, affecting 3.2M consumers in 2018 according to Javelin Research
• Large-scale data breaches increased 273% in the first quarter of 2020. 63% of Americans say they have had data stolen in a data breach, leading to Account Takeover Fraud
• Per FICO, 22% of Americans say their identity has Definitely or is Likely to have been used by a fraudster to open a bank account. That equates to more than 46 million US citizens

Authentication Solutions for Banks

So what’s a bank to do?

At UVeritech, our Financial Institution customers come in all shapes and sizes to match the diverse populations they reach and serve every day. Whether it’s a 4,000 branch behemoth with billions in assets and a nationwide footprint or the neighborhood bank that’s the financial hub enabling the growth and success for its local community, both face fraud and security challenges that can derail a quarter’s performance or present an existential threat.

We acknowledge there exists numerous, transformative solutions in the market that encompass cybersecurity, digital process innovation, and all manner of seen and unseen security measures meant to foil fraud. Needless to say, these are very costly and complex solutions that require many months of requirements discovery to present the perfect bespoke solution that’s (presumably) bulletproof and integrates seamlessly with a litany of internal and external systems.

It’s understandable that onerous cost and complexity in this rapidly shifting market might provoke inertia. And in most situations, waiting to see how things shake out might be the prudent thing to do.

But not here, not now, not in this threat environment. Banks have too much to lose in direct fraud losses, in fines, and ultimately in reputation and customer dissatisfaction, leading to desertion.

As such, we’ve developed a focused solution that addresses a fundamental security tenet – to truly know who you’re letting into your secure space. Authenticating a client’s government issued identity credential document verifies that client's identity, in a manner that presents a simple output (pass/fail/alert), within seconds, and enabling your frontline staff to conduct transaction volumes at speed.

But this fast, simple output doesn’t stem from a simple process. It is the result of massive background computation, with dozens of security tests being performed across a potential array of thousands of global identity document types.

We tell you what happened with the authentication and then we can tell you why – digging into the components of the security scan, showing specific light (UV, IR, visible light) tests, cross-checking personal data stored on the document in both printed and digital formats , or extractions of data from the digital chips embedded in the document.

We also enable you, per your own policies, to configure whether, where and under what circumstances to store ID document images or other types of identity data.

Lastly, we present actionable fraud trends, from an intuitive dashboard showing potential fraud activity taking place across your entire organization’s footprint, whether 30 branches or 300.

We believe in providing the right balance of best class anti-fraud technology at a low cost structure, within an intuitive user interface, all rapidly deployed and installed at your sites.