Biometric Verification: The Truth Around Facial Recognition Technology
With the COVID-19 outbreak taking the world by storm, financial businesses have been affected in all ways. The aftermath on corporate entities is far-reaching and indefinite. To cater to the current needs of the global health emergency, the only way out is by following the rules set forth for standardizing global health protection and minimizing the spread of the disease. Going ‘contactless’ seems to be a good bet for enterprises looking forward to making a feasible business strategy amid the pandemic.
Considering the increasing popularity of the digital space, biometric verification systems will be the new normal in 2021. Since these solutions are backed with bio authentication methods, they are quite relevant in the identity verification industry where validating customers is commonplace.
While numbers by the Federal Trade Commission of the US shows COVID-related fraud cases worth 130 million USD, biometric verification seems to be a viable solution to address these concerns.
Facial Recognition as a Biometric Security Mechanism
Today, biometric services are fuelled by artificial intelligence that incorporates liveness detection and depth sensing features. These are particularly helpful for enterprises and financial organizations that are always on the verge of digital fraud and cybercrime. Facial recognition uses AI models to run a series of checks in which the end user’s facial features are compared against a wide array of similar faces to make sure if it is authentic identity proof or not.
Given the amount of user convenience and efficiency they provide, face biometrics have become an integral part of business operations. On the flip side, the liveness detection feature assesses the overall live presence of the user during the complete interaction. This is a direct solution to facial spoof attacks that fraudsters use to easily deceive facial biometric solutions these days. Although this technology is rapidly emerging, its true potential is still to be discovered.
Amid the COVID-19 Restrictions
Biometric authentication is becoming increasingly popular among both businesses and their customers. When it comes to conducting secure business operations, allowing users to transact with confidence, and performing effortless customer onboarding procedures, companies are looking forward to automating their identity verification mechanisms using biometrics regardless of the type of service they offer. Even though facial biometric verification has become a necessity today, it still has potential advantages and shortcomings.
Why Facial Biometric Verification?
Secure Business Operations
Facial biometric validation is accepted as a feasible solution to verify user identities over an online channel. This in turn helps businesses to keep an eye on pesky bad actors that are always in pursuit of bypassing the security checks, ultimately acting as a deterrent against data breaches and identity theft. Biometric verification, therefore, helps enterprises to reduce false positives and misinterpretations during customer identification processes.
Reliable and on-the-go Verification
Faster is better. This is particularly true when you have to enrol more than 50 clients in a single day. But making the process swift and time-efficient is not enough, since it can come with a fair degree of human error and negligence. Facial recognition solutions stand out both in terms of operational efficiency as well as accuracy which is why businesses are adopting it at a rapid pace. Time saved during customer onboarding directly improves the user experience, allowing businesses to build a better brand image in the market.
Why Not Facial Biometric Verification?
Skin Tone and Color Identification
Even though facial biometric verification seems to have the solution to all the possible problems businesses face, it may fall short when it comes to people with different skin colour. These are one of the shortcomings of facial recognition solutions that need to be addressed. Until these systems can differentiate between people having different races or ethnicity having various facial characteristics and skin tone, their credibility remains questionable.
Costly to Set up and MaintainDespite the benefits it provides in online verification and making business operations seamless, biometric authentication could still be an expensive technology to deploy for small-scale businesses and startups. Apart from that, the cost factors that need to be taken into account for its maintenance add a burden for these business entities.
