Archive for the 'Banking' Category

The latest Security Index report from Unisys contains encouraging figures for organisations considering implementing biometric authentication systems.

13,000 people in 13 countries were surveyed in the poll, which found 57% of UK adults are worried about identity theft, with 63% concerned about credit and debit card fraud.

Three quarters of UK respondents would be willing to use fingerprint authentication to verify identity with banks and government agencies.  This makes Brits more open to biometric technology than any other European country.  56% would be willing to participate in hand vein biometric scanning.

“It is necessary to put in place robust safeguards at the technology level, but also to complement these through training in good practice,” said Jim Norton, senior policy adviser for e-business and e-government at the Institute of Directors.

“Recent high profile stories of data loss should strengthen the call for a balanced approach using the appropriate authentication technology, but also focusing on the right processes and behaviours.”

HSBC will install ten new ‘light immune’ facial recognition units at their two new UK data centres by next summer, as reported by TheEngineer.co.uk today.

HSBC will be working with Surrey-based identity management specialist OmniPerception, who have deployed their products in police forces across the UK amongst other clients.
David McIntosh, chief executive of OmniPerception, said: ‘Helping to prevent sensitive data falling into the wrong hands is clearly an important role for modern facial biometric technology.

‘By being the first to adopt facial-recognition technology for this purpose, HSBC is blazing a trail that will benefit both the banking sector and society as a whole.’

eWeek.com has a great article on preventing fraud in financial institutions, with SocGen being the case in point, using biometric solutions.

From their conclusion:

To mitigate fraud, these banks and financial institutions need to supplement their internal controls compliance with biometric authentication. Biometrics will prevent data breaches of security

Read the rest of the article here.

Kicking off the 2007CIAB Febraban (Brazilian Federation of Banks), South America’s premier banking conference, Wittel, a leading integrator of contact center solutions in Brazil, today announced a partnership with PerSay, the leading provider of advanced voice biometrics solutions, to combat the rising incidence of financial fraud in Brazil.

Voice biometrics technologies take advantage of the fact that each person’s voice is a unique and unobtrusive identifier, like a fingerprint. For contact centers that support banking, telecommunications and other industries, voice biometrics proves to be a cost-effective way to enhance security and improve customer convenience.

Wittel will look for opportunities to seamlessly integrate and support PerSay’s extremely reliable text-dependent VocalPassword and text-independent, transparent FreeSpeech speaker verification products into contact center solutions for Brazil’s leading financial services and telecommunications providers.

“Wittel is committed to offering our clients the most advanced technologies available to combat fraud. PerSay’s voice biometrics solutions clearly deliver cost-effective security, increase call center efficiency, and enhance the customer experience,” said Carlos Louro, President of Wittel. “The timing of this partnership is perfect; Brazil’s leading financial and telecom providers are looking for new approaches-like voice biometrics-to reduce the incidence of fraud.”

“This is a unique opportunity for PerSay to partner with a dominant player in Brazil that can help us bring value to an emerging market here,” said Ariel Freidenberg, Executive VP, PerSay Global Sales and Development. “PerSay is well positioned to deliver simple, natural, voice-based identification and verification solutions to the broad spectrum of telecom and financial services customers in Brazil-from the average consumer to high-net-worth individuals.”

ACB’s 1,000 bank members now can be armed with Edentify’s innovative technology to expose and squelch ID theft and fraud, and protect customers’ identities and banking assets.

America’s Community Bankers (’ACB’), the national trade association committed to strengthening the competitive position of community banks, has selected Edentify, Inc., a leading provider of identity management solutions, as a Preferred Solution Provider to its 1,000 ACB community bank members nationwide, providing the means to root out and thwart ID theft and fraud. Edentify is ACB’s Preferred Solution Provider of ID theft and fraud detection and prevention software, and will offer its proprietary IDBenchmark(TM) 2.0 software to ACB bank members.“Our solutions can provide ACB’s bank members with tight financial security and protection against ID theft and manipulation that works in real time,” says Terrence DeFranco, CEO of Edentify.

“Engaging proactive partners is a major component in our marketing strategy, allowing us to gain critical mass for our solutions, and it is very exciting for us to count ACB as one such partner. ACB member banks utilizing our solutions will be equipped with a robust suite of identity management solutions available in the market, and they will be able to uncover fraudulent activity immediately as it occurs, easily and quickly pinpoint the origin, and take prompt steps to mitigate any damaging effects. With our technology, ACB’s members will be well prepared to protect their organizations and their customers against the growing scourge of ID theft and fraud.”Edentify’s complete software package can detect, prevent, and monitor ID fraud and theft for ACB’s members via three products based on our IDBenchmark(TM) technology.” (more…)