2017 felt a lot like the year of fintech, with countless accelerators, conferences and hackathons vying to make almost any city in the world a Fintech hub. Some of them, like the FCA’s March TechSprint on Money and Mental Health, moved the industry forward in important ways.
Much of the excitement was driven by the imminence of open banking under PSD2, and the big news of the year was regulatory – the launch of Open Banking standards in the UK, and the publication of the European Banking Authority’s Regulatory Technical Standard (RTS) on Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for PSD2 in February.
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This alphabet soup made for thrilling conversations in which non-Fintech people soon lost the will to live, but represented an important starting gun for the restructuring of the payments industry.
The other big news was the September launch of the iPhoneX, with its FaceID technology based on controlled illumination anti-spoofing. At a stroke, this took face verification technology from the futurist fringe directly into the mainstream, and there is no doubt that it instantly redefined the future of authentication.
2018 will be marked by the smell of rubber hitting the road. PSD2 takes effect in January (although the SCA RTS will implement in 2019), and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will kick off in May.
I’m fond of Lampedusa’s aphorism that sometimes “everything must change so that nothing will change”, but this is not one of those moments – both of these regulations will profoundly change our industry.
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By GlobalDataStronger customer identification and authentication will become a must, and 2018 looks to become the Year of Biometrics, when technology, regulation and user expectations converge on a sea change.
We will see the roll-out of some exciting and innovative biometric ways to identify users at onboarding in seconds rather than minutes, and to authenticate them useably yet securely to meet the stringent new requirements. Faces will be at the centre of this change, and with controlled illumination anti-spoofing now the industry standard, I believe iProov will play a major part in this.
Andrew Bud is CEO of iProov:
