Visa’s platform allows banks to use biometric verification

KEN SWEET

NEW YORK — The selfie is everywhere — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — and soon banks could be asking for one in order to approve purchases or credit card applications.

Payment processing giant Visa has created a platform to allow banks to integrate various types of biometrics — from fingerprints to facial and voice recognition — into approving credit card applications and payments.

Consumers could experience Visa’s new platform in a couple different ways. If a person were to apply for a credit card application on his smartphone, the bank

● app could ask the applicant to take a selfie and then take a picture of a driver’s license or passport. The technology will then compare the photos for facial similarities as well as check the validity of the driver’s license, all happening within seconds.

The selfie could also play a role in an online purchase. With the wider acceptance of chip cards in the past couple of years, in-person fraud at retailers is on the decline. But online fraud is still a concern, with as

many as one of six transactions being declined because of suspicious activity, according to Mark Nelsen, senior vice president for risk and authentication products at Visa.

Instead of a bank autodialing a customer when it has concerns about a transaction, this new technology could allow the customer to use Apple’s Touch ID or other fingerprint recognition technology, or take a selfie or record his voice, to verify he made the transaction.

The announcement comes at a time when a huge amount of personal information on 145.5 million Americans

was recently accessed or stolen from the credit bureau Equifax. The information — birthdates, Social Security numbers, addresses, last names — was also information that could be used tomorrow or 20 years from now to potentially commit identity fraud.

Financial companies are particularly interested in biometrics, not surprisingly, as mostly a fraud protection measure. While a birthdate, Social Security number or last name can be more easily stolen or mimicked — as anyone who has been a victim of identity fraud will tell you

— it’s much harder to fraudulently mimic a person’s face, fingerprint or voice.

A bank’s traditional defense against stolen personal data has been a customer creating a password or four-digit personal identification number. But few people change their passwords regularly, or often use the same password for multiple sites, so if it’s stolen from one location, multiple other locations can be affected.

“Traditional methods for authenticating a customer can create frustration or are simply not designed for the new ways people are shopping

and paying,” Nelsen said.

So banks have been tinkering with biometrics for a couple years in various forms. Many banks now accept Apple’s Touch ID in their iPhone apps, which uses a person’s fingerprint to verify identity. Citigroup has rolled out facial recognition in its banking application as another example.

While nearly every bank is interested in biometrics, not every bank has the size and scale that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, or Citigroup has to afford in-house biometrics experts.

What Visa’s platform, which is officially known as

Visa ID Intelligence, will do is provide banks and credit unions a place to install these biometric technologies into their own applications without having to build them in house.