Credit Union testing facial recognition software for customer identification

Securityplus Federal Credit Union will soon install a new automated teller machine that confirms the customer’s identity using facial recognition software, according to a report by Credit Union Journal.

Securityplus FCU has been using fingerprint biometric authentication for its staff of 100 employees for over a decade, but this marks the first time the credit union will offer this kind of a service to its customers.

Mike Adams, FCU senior systems engineer at Securityplus recently met with biometric authentication vendor Real Time Kiosks, which initially pitched Adams on fingerprint technology at branch ATMs.

However, the two eventually decided the process to be far too cumbersome and time consuming a system to be used for Securityplus FCU’s 30,000 clients.

When Adams suggested a system that used facial recognition technology, Real Time Kiosks was happy to oblige. The company began working on developing a kiosk with biometric facial-recognition technology, which it will introduce to Securityplus FCU clients later this month.

In the meantime, 15 CU employees were selected to participate in the beta testing phase during the past few months.

Real Time Kiosks’ touch screen machine will be installed at one of the credit union’s seven branches.

Once clients enter their identification number, the kiosk will take a picture of their face and store the image in its records.

Then later, when a client uses the kiosk to perform a transition, the facial recognition system will compare their scanned face against its database of images and look for a match.

Clients can also enter their regular eight-digit pin number to verify their identity at the kiosk.

If a client is performing multiple transactions the software will continually scan his or her face. In the event that a new face appears, the transaction automatically stops.

“This is a prototype for one branch and we are going to see how successful it is,” said Adams, who is confident that clients will be able to use the kiosk for the first time and quickly register their image and perform a transaction without any help. “If the members like it and it frees up our tellers to cross-sell products, I would think we would roll another one of these out within a year.”

The kiosk is not intended to completely replace the credit union’s tellers, but instead, it is designed to improve the overall member experience, said Adams.

Article Topics

authentication  |  banking  |  biometrics  |  identity proofing