Facial Recognition for Smart Banking, Smart Office and Smart Retail

In this era of convergence wherein many utilities have converged into our smartphones. We can say that smartphone is the intelligent tool we have which is solving many of our days to day needs. Banking segments has also adopted the mobile ecosystem to serve people better. The new smart banking apps fulfilling most of the banking needs in few clicks. The convenience of mobile banking has associated security risks and the threat of misuse.

Facial Recognition based authentication system has been making inroad in some of the advance countries to reduce such threats. Recently, challenger bank Knab has tapped face verification firm iProov to roll out its biometric authentication technology to the bank’s 500,000 customers. Knab aims to use iProov’s technology to meet Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements. In China also, face-based authentication is used for payments in a big way.

In retail banking, the use of face recognition can help managers to authenticate locker users. In fact, the entire journey of access to lockers can be automated with face recognition based access control systems. Nowadays, many facial recognition companies are providing liveliness detection as part of their software. This makes the authentication process more robust and foolproof.

Face Recognition software also tracks the ageing and sentiments apart from gender recognition. Banks can use the technology of demographic study of visitors, footfall counting in the branches or at Kiosk and promote personalized or advertise their services as per demography.

Offices post COVID era will undergo drastic changes. Touchless entry, face-based biometric attendance system, social distancing etc. some of the new normal needs in the offices. Artificial intelligence-based video analytic systems along with face recognition systems are the answer to all such needs. Many offices have already started integrating their existing CCTV network with new Facial recognition-based attendance system, that can integrate with their HRMS. The need for social distancing in offices is a must requirement.

Facial recognition-based video analytic system can monitor the distances between staff and generate alerts when proximity reduces between them. Such systems can also count the number of staff moving in and out as also recognize if staff are wearing a mask or not.

Again, in retail, all the above use cases are relevant for their staff or shoppers. In addition, demographic analytics can help retailers to place and plan their inventory inside the retail shop. Some face recognition software also tracks the gaze of a person looking towards the camera. This is an excellent feature that can be used to play personalized ads on billboards and announce discount schemes based on the attention of onlookers. The ads can also play based on demography and footfall.

By Bikas Jha, Country Head, RealNetworks Pvt. Ltd.