In a rapidly changing environment where customer expectations are tied to technological change, mobile capture and identity verification leader Mitek is well-positioned to grow with the industry, general manager of identity Sarah Clark said.
Mitek has developed its check capture technology over a dozen years, Ms. Clark said. While working with banks to refine the check capturing experience, Mitek learned of the many pain points with identity verification.
“We’ve been working on that for for years,” Ms. Clark said.”We realized its not a US and Canadian problem, it’s something that is interesting on a global scale. There are a lot of pain points with being able to be confident that someone on the other end of the digital transaction is who they say they are.”
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Ms. Clark said the market has grown in step with digital banking as financial institutions strive to create a true digital experience from customer onboarding and acquisition through servicing. It begins with opening an account, which traditionally involves physically visiting a bank with identification to prove you are who you say you are.
That step is both a challenge and an opportunity for banks, Ms. Clark said. Younger customers who have grown up with their mobile phones question antiquated steps like having to actually go to a bank to prove your identity. Identification producers have recognized this and have built in complex security features which mobile cameras and platforms can detect to confirm identity. Platform deep learning capabilities have also advanced to where they can detect subtle security features and slight differences between real and forged identification.
Ms.Clark said Mitek continuously analyzes pieces of identification to learn new forgery techniques, with their discoveries incorporated into its deep learning systems.
“It’s quite an amazing concept thats grown quite sophisticated,” Ms. Clark said.
Now that EMV adoption is complete, criminals have moved away from POS fraud and toward using fraudulent identities to sign up for accounts at triple the frequency of pre-EMV levels, Ms. Clark said. That presents a challenge in the mobile age.
“We really serve a market that needs to meet Know Your Customer regulations and that’s interested in improving mobile user experience and mobile capture. But it also needs to have more sophisticated mechanisms for identity verification in general to combat synthetic identifications and other techniques used to open fraudulent accounts.”
Financial institutions must also contend with increasing regulation, which means Mitek has to as well, Ms. Clark said. Recent challenges have included adapting to new Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering requirements.
Then there is an evolving customer base highlighted by older millennials who are driving changes to the user experience as they begin to apply for mortgages and make investments. expecting that to be done through their mobile device.
“Lenders and banks, even if they are not mobile optimized, the sheer rate of people trying to use their website from a mobile device is a huge problem,” Ms. Clark explained. “If they are not mobile optimized it all becomes abandonment because the user experience is so poor.”
Look for continued development in biometrics, computer vision and fractal light, which can be randomized to create incredibly sophisticated likeness detection, Ms. Clark said.
“There is a transformation away from the paradigm that you know information and that defines who you are and what you can access. That concept that you can be defined, identified and given access based on something you know is widely seen as insecure.”
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