Cyber Defense eMagazine February Edition for 2022

downturns and it would appear during global pandemics according to a recent study by the World Bank.
Fraud presents itself in many different formats, from false account setup, unauthorised account access
and money laundering. While the criminal fraternity, may look to line their own pockets, there is a more
extreme side, which funds drugs cartels or finances terror organisations.
After the financial crisis of 2008, financial organisations became heavily regulated and KYC was
introduced as a regulatory requirement after a series of major fraud, money laundering and tax evasion
cases. However, even in the last decade global financial services have been exposed by a number of
money laundering scandals which have resulted in over $36 billion in fines.
Heavy regulation ultimately creates more friction, especially for the consumer. 1 in 5 banks onboarding
times have doubled, from 4 to 8 weeks and expect this time to increase even further. This challenge has
been typically addressed head on by throwing money and head count at the very manual and legacy
process for KYC. However, COVID has forced a new way of thinking.
eKYC/mKYC – (Electronic/Mobile) requirements have driven transformational change in organisations,
who can no longer expect customers to visit branch offices and present themselves in person for manual
KYC. Additionally, using computer vision and artificial intelligence has removed the subjective human
error prone process of matching a person to a photograph, providing higher levels of assurance, that an
individual is who they claim to be.
But what options are available for eKYC? Actually, there are a number of options available to
organisations to securely and remotely perform Identity Verification. Let’s explore a couple of them.
Firstly, it is now possible to take the tried and tested identity document, such as passport, driving license
or identity card and remotely scan that document into a mobile application, this can be done by simply
capturing the document with the mobile camera or for a more reliable and performant solution, leveraging
the document RFID chip to extract information via NFC to the smartphone. While not everybody has the
latest phones capable of using NFC and not every government documentation that has a RFID chip to
extract information from, it’s encouraging to know there is always a fall-back option of simply taking a
picture of the document.
We then simply use the same application to take a selfie and the application attempts to match the selfie
with the face image extracted from the documentation. In the background there is a validation check of
the document itself, is it a genuine document, has it been reported lost or stolen? All of these factors
combined, allow organisations to deliver a remote and secure on-boarding capability, which also provides
a frictionless user experience for customers. It accelerates the KYC process and reduces costs at the
same time.
All good? Well not quite, unfortunately Government documentation availability is not a certainty,
additionally face matching from a 10-year-old photograph which has been captured using the mobile
phone camera (as opposed to NFC) comes with its challenges in terms of performance and reliability.
Additionally, cultural and religious requirements can present additional problems when the app asks to
perform a selfie for face verification, add in poor lighting conditions and a requirement for “liveness”
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