In a recent podcast from PaymentsJournal, Micheal Sheehy, chief compliance officer at payments firm Payoneer, pointed to large-scale recent fraud cases such as the Equifax data breach, Covid unemployment scams, and PPP loans, saying that it has “really become obvious that the only way to prevent this fraud is a live biometric check.”
The exec argued for the benefits of mixing biometric data with digital identity highlighting how a government database can be used to access digital IDs and by “cross-checking it with a biometric test, you can tie the two of them together.”
Sheehy also pointed out how some Asian economies are fairly far ahead of the West when it comes to implementing biometrics for fraud prevention.
“Singapore and Malaysia have actually mandated biometrics in their KYC,” he explains. “They’re telling the financial institutions in those markets, if your customers are not in front of you when you’re selling financial products, you need to have a liveness and KYC check.”