-
Banks are gravitating toward a new technology they think can help customers more easily open mobile accounts: allowing customers to photograph their driver's license from their smartphone to help them auto-fill portions of their application.
March 24 -
Voice biometrics, fingerprint recognition, device ID and behavioral analytics are at long last becoming accurate and convenient enough for prime time.
May 12
Mitek on Tuesday rolled out a new imaging technology for financial services companies called Photo Verify. It lets bank customers take a smartphone photo of their driver's license to verify their identity.
"We're working with banks and credit issuers to use that technology to remove friction from the mobile account opening process," Sarah Clark, vice president of product at Mitek, said in an interview. The company already has 3,000 financial institutions using its MiSnap auto capture technology for mobile check deposit.
Banks and others have seen an upswing in customers trying to open accounts using their mobile device, Clark said. A year ago, 10% of account openings were conducted from mobile devices; this year it's 30% and growing.
Confirming that the person on the other end of a mobile device is who he says he is at signup is a challenge, especially in the 10% to 20% of cases where consumer credit check providers like Experian and LexisNexis raise questions and want to see additional identity documentation. This can happen when a consumer has a thin file, or if there are multiple variations of a name on file.
In such cases, if the bank or credit card company asks the customer to upload additional identification documents, "the drop-off number is extremely high," Clark said.
Mitek's MiSnap software lets a user hover a smartphone over a license and capture the information on it. The software also reads invisible security features on the license, including those that can't be seen under an ultraviolet light. Not all state licenses have security features, but most do.
In addition to account opening, MiSnap could also be used to secure high-risk transactions or to validate the addition of a new card to a mobile wallet. For security reasons, the driver's license image is not stored on the consumer's device.
