Using Azure to Drive Security in Banking Using Biometrics
Inthe digital world we live in today, it’s getting harder to verifyidentity in industries such as banking. We now do less and lesstransactions in person. No longer do we go into banks with passbook inhand and make deposits or withdrawals face to face with a bank teller.Many of us have moved from ATM transactions to digital banking.
With this move, banks have tried many approaches of 2-factorauthentication, some better than others and obviously the need is therefor secure forms of authentication for the users. Let me tell you howAzure is driving identity security in banking using biometricidentification. By combining biometrics with artificial intelligence,banks are now able to take new approaches at verifying the digitalidentity of their customers and prospects.
If you don’t know, biometrics is the process of uniquely identifying aperson’s physical and personal traits. These are then recorded into adatabase and those images or features are captured into an electronicdevice and are used as a unique form of identification. Some methods weuse biometrics are fingerprint and facial recognition, hand geometry,iris or eye scan and even odor or scents.
Because of their uniqueness, these are much more reliable inconfirming a person’s identity than a password or access card. So, howdo you verify a person is who they say they are if they’re not inperson? Microsoft partners are now leveraging some of the Azure platformofferings to do this—things such as Cognitive Service’s Vision API andAzure Machine Learning tools for performing multi-factor authenticationin the banking industry.
The way this works is the user provides a government issued ID (alicense or passport for example) and they validate it against standardsprovided by the ID issuer, so they’re building an algorithm forverification of that ID and putting that into a database. So, whensomeone submits an ID from a particular state, we know what that ID issupposed to look like and we look for all the distinguishing features ofthat ID.
To take this a step further, the second factor is they’re usingfacial recognition software on things like your phone or computer, likeFace ID for the iPhone. It will take your photo, but it will also take avideo of you and force you to move your head in certain motions inorder validate that is it you - you’re not wearing a mask or something –and that you’re alive.
It takes a picture of your ID and matches it to your facialconstructions and compares them side by side; this becomes your digitalsignature. This is considered extremely secure as now you have two formsof verification and you’re using biometrics. Crazy stuff when you thinkabout it but in the digital world we live in, you must go to theselengths to verify someone’s identity when they are not right in frontyou.
This is still in the early phase of what we’ll see but it’s cool tosee how it’s being used and will be interesting to see how it progressesin the future. We’ve got great consultants working with CognitiveServices and Machine Learning. Anything data or Azure related, we’redoing it.