Secure your customer onboarding and access to digital banking (Solution Paper)

3 ways to secure customer onboarding and access to digital banking services

• Deliver a streamlined onboarding process 
• Secure daily access to your digital services with strong customer authentication (SCA) and risk based authentication (RBA)
• Mitigate fraud and improve customer experience with risk management

A streamlined onboarding process 

The shift from traditional to digital banking has been underway for many years.

Needless to say, the pandemic has accelerated this trend and changed our habits. Mobile phones have changed our consumption patterns, making it easier for people to open an account or connect to their bank in a few minutes. Mobile is now the preferred banking channel.

FIs must meet this demand if they want to attract new customers.

The challenge is that users may face inconvenience when they onboard with a complex online experience that does not put the end user in focus.

The solution?

By combining identity proofing, identity affirmation and identity compliance, Fls can now secure the onboarding process while improving risk assessment over time, reducing fraud levels, and allowing users to onboard in real time without inconvenience.  

• Identity proofing: Opening a digital banking account has never been more straightforward and secure. You can deliver a seamless digital customer onboarding in banking experience, avoid abandonment during the enrolment phase and adhere to stringent (KYC) regulations. To provide this, you need identity-proofing services such as:
  • Document verification,
  • Face recognition with liveness detection
•  Identity affirmation:  identity affirmation complements the identity proofing process by providing additional evidence for an identity claim and increasing confidence. This is done using risk management technologies to analyse the environment and user behaviour to detect suspicious activities. 
• Identity compliance: This feature provides KYC compliance services that cover extended data intelligence for anti-money laundering (AML), anti-corruption, combating the financing of terrorism (CFT), politically exposed persons (PEP), economic sanctions, third-party data, and commercial risk.

Securing daily access to your digital services with SCA and RBA

How people consume financial services has considerably changed, encouraged by using digital devices such as mobile phones to interact with banking services. 

This means consuming digital banking services attracts hackers and increases the risk of account takeover attacks. To secure user access to digital banking services, prevent account takeover, and improve user experience, we combine two distinctive authentication technologies:

• Strong customer authentication (SCA)
  Provides evidence of user identity for a known customer with multi-factor authentication, allowing to comply with international regulations. SCA combines at least two out of three different authentication factors:
  1.    something you own (possession), usually a mobile device
  2.   something you know (knowledge), a PIN or a password
  3.   something you are (inherence), biometrics, either physical as fingerprint or facial, or behavioural, e.g. a user's typing pattern    
• Risk-based authentication (RBA)
  Adapt your authentication strategy to the level of risk to reduce recurring customer friction and account takeover. This is done by collecting several attributes related to the user's behaviour, the device used, and the location from where the access is attempted. These attributes are collected silently, without friction or interference with the user experience, and raise a flag when risky behaviour is detected.

You can simultaneously improve your service's user experience and security by combining RBA and SCA.

Risk management to mitigate fraud and improve customer experience

Gemalto IdCloud uses risk management technologies for identity affirmation and risk-based authentication (RBA). They harness the power of four layers of intelligence, which create a dynamic profile, giving you the confidence you can securely identify a 'valid' consumer based on their online interactions:

• Device Intelligence
• Behavioural biometric
• Behavioural analytics
• Trust consortium

By combining these layers of intelligence, risk management can identify the user's device and how they behave. It can detect an anomaly if an unknown network or device is used, which may reveal fraudster activities. 

Moreover, with behavioural biometrics and analytics, you can detect account takeover and social engineering attacks and spot abnormal situations when analysing patterns and habits at individual and population levels. 

Why are banks moving to the cloud?

Protecting online banking services while gaining cost advantages, increased speed to market and agility in execution are the main benefits banks, and fintechs get by moving their services to the cloud.

New customer onboarding, daily access and transaction approvals are protected to meet regulatory compliance and customer expectations regarding security without compromising the user experience.

While traditional banks have been reluctant to move parts of their operations to the cloud, they are increasingly following fintech and digital banks. They are ready to embark on a digital transformation journey to stay competitive.

We wish you an enjoyable read.

Source: "Capturing value in the cloud", The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021