Banks to ask customers to confirm identity with a selfie
Banks trialling new system where customers take a selfie to prove they are who they say they are.
The time may soon be upon us when your bank asks you for a selfie to prove your identity. New security software means facial recognition could be used to prevent fraud.
Several banks are preparing to trial a new system that gets customers to take selfies in order to verify their identities, according to reports.
It's down to some new software called Perceive, which assesses your features from a photo taken by your phone. The system is linked to your social media accounts, such as Facebook or Twitter, to check the picture against your profile pictues. This generates a score that determines if the person is likely to be who they say they are.
The company behind the software, Socure, says that several US banks are already using the technology to reduce the chances of credit card fraud. Now the Evening Standard is reporting that several British banks are interested in the technology.
This isn’t the first case of selfies potentially being used for financial security. MasterCard has plans to launch 'Selfie Pay', where facial recognition software is used to verify a smartphone user before they can pay for something.
However, using facial recognition as a security feature has failed in the past. Google has attempted to use it to unlock phones, but had to scrap the system after people realised they could use a photo of a person to unlock their phone.
MasterCard thinks it has found a way of getting around the potential of people using photos, by insisting that for a payment to succeed the person will have to blink several times to show they are alive and authorising the payment.
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