Standard Bank has partnered with iiDENTIFii, a Cape Town-based technology company that enables remote biometric digital authentication and automated onboarding.
By deploying the iiDENTIFii solution across the bank’s existing product and service offerings, Standard Bank is shifting to branchless banking and meeting customers’ demands for simple, secure and friction-free banking.
The technology also allows all customers, irrespective of demographic or location, to use the latest banking services which, for some, were previously unattainable.
Funeka Montjane, chief executive: personal and business banking, South Africa at Standard Bank Group, believes that mobile is the new branch.
“Working with iiDENTIFii, we can onboard new customers, securely, in under 60 seconds. This empowers the bank to bring its various offerings in line with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and become a leader in branchless banking.”
Standard Bank recently launched its pioneering MyMo account – a new low-cost account which rewards customers with free mobile data upon registration. With the iiDENTIFii solution now embedded, customers can securely open this account via their mobile phones without having to go into a branch.
Identity fraud is a major issue for banking digitalistion. According to Lance Fanaroff, a director of iiDENTIFii, innovations and advancements in digital identity technology are making a balance between convenience and security more achievable.
He adds that using a mobile phone and an official identity document, the iiDENTIFii technology platform does four critical things:
* It proves that the person is alive, therefore enabling strong authentication and far outperforming gesture-based & parallax technologies;
* It matches the selfie the user has taken with the image on their ID document;
* The data is then extracted off the identity document – including the person’s name, surname and ID number; and
* All the data is then matched with a facial biometric at an issuing authority or government department (for instance, Home Affairs).
The technology can be integrated into any mobile platform by means of a robust software development kit (SDK), providing the critical ability to customise its functionality according to each institution’s specific requirements.
iiDENTIFii underwent a rigorous eight-month proof of concept process with Standard Bank, during which the technology was stress-tested at scale. iiDENTIFii has been verified as legally compliant by ENSAfrica.