Mitek biometrics help immigrants access credit as BFSI providers embrace digital payments
Biometrics and related technologies continue to make significant headway in the financial services industry. Mitek has partnered up to extend credit to U.S. immigrants with biometrics, while Mobey Forum has launched a new group to help financial institutions embrace new technologies. Smart Engines’ document scanning technology has been implemented by a Russian bank, Visa has launched its online payments system with biometric authentication in Canada, Iraq is seeing digital payments growth, and Vietnam’s digital bank is back for a second attempt to break into the market and decrease the number of unbanked people in the country.
Face biometrics provided by Mitek will enable immigrants to establish credit in the U.S., through a partnership with Nova Credit.
Mitek Mobile Verify will be used to help immigrants in America use their international credit history to establish their financial trustworthiness in their new country.
The Pew Research Center estimates that 14 percent of America’s population was born elsewhere, and there are at least 15 million temporary or permanent legal residents currently visiting the country, according to the announcement. In the past, it would take these people up to five years to establish credit history equivalent to that in their home country, but with the Credit Passport from Nova Credit, their integration into the U.S. financial system is accelerated, the companies say.
The integration of Mitek’s technology also enables Nova Credit’s lending customers to identity and mitigate risk, and comply with know your customer (KYC) regulations. Applicants use Nova Credit’s mobile-based system with Mobile Verify to verify their identities with ID document and selfie photos for face biometric matching.
BFSI sector drives biometric payments market
The BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sector is expected to play the key role in the biometric payment market’s growth over the next several years, according to Transparency Market Research.
Transparency says the market will grow significantly in the next few years, driven in part by increasing digitization, as well as increasing smartphone and penetration. Along with BFSI, the retail, hospitality, and industrial sectors will contribute to market growth. The need for high security to defeat fraud and phishing, along with the growing volume of online transactions, make BFSI the highest-growth area for biometric payments.
Strong growth is anticipated in North America, with a mature technology provider market and a high number of online transactions. Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will follow North America in revenue generated, Transparency’s research shows. The Latin American market also has a positive outlook, and Transparency writes that proactive players will monitor it for opportunities.
The vendor landscape, according to Transparency, remains fragmented, with regional and international players.
Mobey Forum forms Payments Experts Group
The Mobey Forum has formed a new Payments Experts Group to help banks and other financial institutions adapt to new technologies and analyze the strategic options in the changing payments landscape.
Representatives of UBS, CaixaBank and Nets will co-chair the group. The group and its priorities were detailed in a recent podcast from the Mobey Forum.
“There is a growing opportunity for banks to lead the charge as enablers of new payment technologies,” states CaixaBank Manager of Operations Xavier Herrero. “However, this relies on accurate insight into both the key trends today, and the emerging trends of tomorrow. A key objective of the Payments Expert Group is to identify the factors that are shaping the future of the industry, so that banks can proactively implement strategies which will lead to long-term success.”
BFSI driving computer vision market growth
A new report from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) forecasts that computer vision is expected to grow by nearly $16.8 million, or 25.4 percent from 2019 to 2024, driven largely by the BFSI sector.
The ‘Computer Vision: A Game Changer for Banking, Financial Services and Insurance’ report says technologies like biometric facial recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) help BFSI organizations with advanced KYC processes, making branches smarter, and with improvements in unstructured document reading, commercial banking improvements.
The SmartIDReader technology from Smart Engines has been implemented by Moscow Credit Bank (MCB) for instant and accurate capture of client ID documents, credit cards and barcodes.
The MCB Online mobile app now extracts data from identity and payment credentials with optical character recognition when the credential is held up to a smartphone camera. Near-instant recognition works even in extreme lighting conditions, Smart Engines says, and can extract data to fill in contracts. Captured data is stored on the customer’s device, rather than a server or with a third party, to provide data security.
Visa rolls out Click to Pay in Canada for secure online shopping with biometrics
Click to Pay with Visa has launched in Canada following a successful rollout in the U.S., to enable fast and secure online purchases from various merchants and platforms with advanced authentication methods including device binding and biometrics.
Online shopping has doubled in Canada on a year-over-year basis as of May. The new service promises lower shopping cart abandonment by eliminating the need to manually type in personal account numbers and passwords after the shopper has registered a credit card, according to the announcement.
Click to Pay is based on the EMV Secure Remote Commerce standard, and is interoperable with the EMVCo tokenization and 3-D Secure specifications.
“As a Canadian leader in digital payments, Moneris is very excited to help Visa bring the Click to Pay experience to Canadian businesses in 2021,” states Malcolm Fowler, chief strategic partnership officer at Moneris in the announcement. “Click to Pay brings value to our merchants and to consumers through simple, efficient and secure transactions.”
Iraqi mobile payment app sees transaction spike
Iraq’s national payment card provider Qi Card says that digital money transfers through its mobile app have risen three-fold compared to previous months, which reflects the appeal of the solution’s security and convenience, according to the announcement.
The Qi Card’s adoption significantly reduces the country’s reliance on cash transactions, bringing fintech, biometric identification, and digital payment technologies to Iraqi citizens. The card contains biometric fingerprint data, though matching must be performed through a separate scanner.
Vietnam digital bank relaunches
Timo Plus, the first digital bank in Vietnam, has relaunched its services with a new partner and a new CEO, Nikkei Asia reports.
Viet Capital Bank replaces VPBank as Timo Plus’ partner, and Henry Nguyen is the new CEO. Nguyen says the new partnership will be closer than the old, with Timo Plus and Viet Capital Bank working together on new products.
A recent study from Boston Consulting Group indicated that only 40 percent of Vietnamese have bank accounts, so the market is ripe for digital disruption. While the incumbents are traditional financial services providers, they are not all stuck in the past, with TPBank offering authentication with biometric facial recognition.
The first time around, Timo was challenged by high operations and compliance costs, but Viet Capital recently gained the first state approval for remote customer due diligence checks.
Article Topics
BFSI | biometric identification | biometric payments | biometrics | digital identity | digital payments | facial recognition | financial services | identity verification | KYC | Mitek | Mobey Forum | Smart Engines | Visa
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