iProov, iiDENTIFii help Standard Bank create network of trust

It’s one thing to know your customer, and another thing to know your customer is real. As GenAI becomes a more potent threat to financial institutions, powering surging levels of bank fraud and deepfake scams, standard minimum-threshold KYC processes no longer cut the mustard. Banks are realizing this and turning to biometrics as a way to verify that their customers are human before proceeding to get to know them.

In a Future Identity panel sponsored by iProov, the company’s VP of Market Intelligence, Paul Jackson, leads a discussion on how to go “Beyond KYC” – and specifically how Standard Bank is employing biometrics for advanced identity verification. It features Jonathan Lamb, head of Channels & Partnerships at CIB Digital for Standard Bank, alongside iProov CEO Andrew Bud and Gur Geva, CEO of South African biometrics provider iiDENTIFii, which has a long-standing partnership with iProov.

Lamb says the traditional financial services products that Standard Bank has offered its top tier clients have evolved with the progress of digital transformation.

That begins with fundamental questions: “If you’re going to show up as a digitally-led corporate investment bank, what should that look like? If you are going to digitally engage with the individuals that work for a client that you bank, what is the art of the possible there?”

Furthermore, Lamb says, there is a desire to embrace new types of partnerships with fintech firms. “Banks and fintechs have had relationships for many years, but often more in a vendor customer type relationship where the fintech would be a vendor to the bank, and the bank would then use that capability to build something and then onsell it to our clients.”

Lamb says that consultations with clients, combined with the accelerated move to online services during the pandemic, has led Standard Bank to reframe how it defines partnerships, and to look more closely at how organizations manage risk.

IDV tech widely applicable across sectors

One of the earliest new partnerships to be focused on biometric identity verification formed with iiDENTIFii. The firm became the first official partner on OneHub, a platform that consolidates all the Standard Bank corporate and investment banking digital offerings for centralized access. Lamb says “you can log in one way now and access everything you used to have, and right alongside that are these new non-traditional products.”

There are now seven partners on One Hub, including South African mobile telecom company Vodacom.

Lamb notes that selling any company on innovative digital tools, but especially large established corporations, is no easy feat. Banks are not IT or identity providers, so getting clients on board with One Hub partners like iiDENTIFii takes some work.

Yet it has paid off, as the bank begins to create integrated networks with its clients and partners.  Standard Bank is working with the firm Robin Hood to develop a trusted way to get benefits money to South Africans who are owed. They have integrated iiDENTIFii’s biometric identity verification into the process, to ensure assets are “reunited” with the people they are intended for.

The firm’s type of biometric ID technology, Lamb says, can be used in virtually any organization in any industry. “I’m not saying we should try and crowd it in where it doesn’t belong. But every business does business with other people, we flow money between each other, we buy goods, we sell goods. We need to protect our licenses. We need to comply with our regulators. And his type of capability is perfectly suited.”

Biometric matching is ‘the easy bit’

The relationship between iProov and iiDENTIFii goes back seven years. Andrew Bud returns to the theme of trust, spinning the vaguely Pythonesque but probably true chestnut that “only organizations that are trustworthy can genuinely be trusted to deliver trust.”

Yet the challenge is getting more difficult, in that “the basis for trust is that ultimately you’re dealing with the person that you thought you were dealing with.” The same applies to ID numbers, devices or any transactional scenario.

“The world is moving towards a point at which it understands that at some point, you have to bind the real human being to everything else that you know about them.” Lamb says the only way to do that is with biometrics – “but the biometric bit, and apologies to my friends in the biometric matching industry, that’s the easy bit.”

Presentation attack detection (PAD) was all well and good for a while. But, says Bud, “the world in the last year or 18 months has transformed completely. Tools have now become available in the last 18 months that makes it either cheap or free for anybody to swap their face for the face of anybody else that they choose.” Generative AI can create deepfakes that are extremely hard for the naked eye to spot.

On cue, Bud conjures the dire spirit of the Hong Kong CEO deepfake that cost global civil engineering consultancy Arup $25 million. The victim, says Bud, claims the deepfaked board of executives that ordered the fraudulent transaction were “completely believable and realistic.”

As such, biometric identity verification – for banks or for anyone – needs liveness detection if it is to prove useful in a world of AI deepfakes gone wild. Bud says widespread claims of no-sweat liveness detection across platforms are convenient, but untrue. “Unfortunately it’s much cheaper to say that you defend against deepfakes than actually to deliver it.”

Providing “genuine presence assurance,” Bud says, is “the hardest problem in the market today.” Yet he also agrees with Lamb’s statement about the importance of trust in getting people on board. Inclusivity is a “prerequisite” to success: “it only works if the whole thing is so easily, accessibly usable by anybody on any device that it delivers enormously high conversion rates.”

Networked trust makes for stronger foundation

Standard Bank, says Bud, is indicative of what is happening around the world. Banks that engage with biometric identity verification and authentication for onboarding trigger an uptick of internal interest, which leads to other use cases (for instance, binding mobile phones or executing high-value transactions.)

But he says Lamb is ahead of the curve in leveraging the bank’s reputation and standing as a trusted entity to grow use cases among its network of partners and in the wider economy. And it is quickly becoming necessary for organizations across the spectrum to look at the importance of updating identity verification processes to reflect current realities, by ensuring they have effective authentication and liveness detection in place.

“I think across the world financial institutions are shifting towards a much more robust approach to onboarding, a much more secure approach to onboarding, an approach to onboarding that recognizes that a $100 deepfake equipment package will defeat every identity verification system they’ve put in place at the moment.”

Banks, firms across the globe reflect shift toward biometrics in financial services

In a recent piece for Biometric Update, Xin Ren, senior director of data science at Feedzai, makes the case that “regulating AI and expanding the role of technology actors in the financial services sector is essential to curb the evolution of fraud.”

“Banks will no longer only need to ask, ‘Is this the right person?’ but also, ‘Is my client human or AI?’,” Xin writes. “Collaboration is becoming key, as banks are increasingly joining forces with other financial institutions, including fintechs and regtechs.”

She is not alone in her belief that biometrics and AI tools are key defenses against emergent fraud techniques. A bevy of firms has introduced new biometric security and authentication features, showing a worldwide trend.

Integrating device biometrics

California firm interface.ai has posted a blog announcing that device biometrics has been integrated into its authentication system – which it claims as an industry first for financial services AI providers. Its Voice AI and Chat AI products will leverage “device-based fingerprint and facial recognition technology to authenticate users, typically when the AI is dealing with account-based queries, such as moving money or checking account balance.”

Per the release, device biometrics analyzes both static traits (like device type and configuration) and dynamic traits (such as geolocation and behavioral patterns) unique to each user’s device, adding an extra, “nearly impossible-to-fake layer of security” with no added friction.

Stepping up in-app ID verification

London firm Revolut has also introduced a new biometric security feature to prevent thieves from accessing accounts on stolen devices. A release says Wealth Protection is “an extra layer of in-app identity verification, designed to prevent thieves from accessing customer savings within the Revolut app.” It uses face biometrics matched against a registered selfie to add protection against physical theft, ‘shoulder surfing’ for passwords and personal info, and fraudulent transfers.

Woody Malouf, head of financial crime at Revolut, says that with phone thefts on the rise, “Wealth Protection has been built to counteract theft by providing our customers with that extra layer of security when you’re out and about this summer. Our customers will be able to rest easy knowing that even if their phone is lost or stolen, their hard earned savings are more secure.”

Revolut, which aims to disrupt financial services and become “the world’s first truly global bank” has grown by over 10 million customers globally in 2024. In addition to its anti-theft biometrics for devices, it is also rolling out ATMS with facial recognition for identity authentication in 2025. (Another banking use case seeing increasing adoption, as ATM FRT deployments in South Korea and Japan demonstrate.)

Mandating biometric registration

In Vietnam, the banks have gone even further, mirroring strict mandatory biometrics requirements in Kuwait that have seen thousands of Kuwaitis face account suspensions. A communication from the Vietnamese government says that as of January 1, 2025, Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank) will temporarily suspend transactions for customers who have not set up biometrics.

Currently, over 40 percent of the nearly 250,000 customers using bank card services at Vietcombank have completed biometric installation on Vietcombank Digibank. The bank has opened additional transaction points outside of business hours to allow customers to register biometrics in person on weekends.

Digital ID for account opening

Digital ID is also becoming a requirement for Ethiopians seeking to open a bank account in the capital of Addis Ababa as of January 1, 2025.

Shega quotes a letter signed by Vice Governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia Solomon Desta, who says the bank “has mandated all banks to require a National ID (Fayda) as a mandatory requirement for opening bank accounts.”

The capital requirement will be followed by mandatory digital ID for bank account openings in other major cities, and a nationwide compliance deadline of January 2026. The national digital ID’s real-time identity verification system has nearly ten million registrations to date.

Biometric identity verification is booming on the African continent. According to new numbers from Smile ID, biometric verifications in Nigeria have doubled in the past two years and verifications using National Identification Numbers (NINs) have grown by 80 percent.

Article Topics

banking  |  biometric authentication  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  identity verification  |  iiDENTIFii  |  iProov  |  KYC  |  onboarding