How Finance Innovators Deliver a Secure, Seamless Mobile Banking Experience
Lessons From Al Ain Finance
Offering secure, user-friendly digital banking journeys has never been more imperative — or complex. As the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered retail branches, mobile and online banking adoption exploded. Surveys suggest these habits will continue long after the pandemic.
Unfortunately, only half of the world’s banks have invested in the technologies they need to satisfy the skyrocketing demand for digital services.
The UAE’s Al Ain Finance, by contrast, presents a vivid example of digital leadership. The company, which offers alternative financing solutions to enterprises of all sizes, optimized agility by being the first in the UAE to deploy its software provider’s cloud-native core banking solution. As executives extended this solution with digital front-office omnichannel banking services, they began to search for a way to secure customer access and transactions using multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Balancing Security and Convenience
Today’s consumers expect a seamless experience as they transact online. They also expect protection against threats to their financial data. Financial institutions have struggled to balance these requirements while also ensuring compliance with Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering and GDPR legislation.
What’s more, authentication methods are changing rapidly. Multi-factor authentication is widely acknowledged to be the most secure. Yet HID research suggests that many financial institutions use solutions that rely on SMS notifications to verify customer identity, despite the clear vulnerabilities posed by the issue of SIM swapping. More traditional authentication methods like secret questions and email password resets are also still widely in use — leaving sensitive customer data vulnerable to fraud and attack.
A Scalable Security Solution
Al Ain Finance executives knew they needed an authentication solution that offered a robust set of advanced security capabilities — from easy enrollment and transaction signing through simplified self-service — and would scale to meet the requirements of their fast-growing digital portfolio.
They found an answer in the cloud-based HID Authentication Service, which provides a secure, flexible authentication platform, and its HID Approve mobile-based transaction signing and authentication application. HID Approve combines the security of public key-based encryption and out-of-band transaction signatures with the convenience of push notifications. Together, the technologies offer seamless protection for Al Ain Finance customer data and transactions while delivering an intuitive online and mobile app-based experience.
What’s more, because the solution was pre-integrated with Al Ain Finance’s existing banking software, deployment was completed in just three months.
“We can now offer a growing set of banking services through efficient and seamless digital channels with the highest levels of identity assurance,” said Ajith Nayak, Operations Manager with Al Ain Finance. “The HID interface makes enrollment and use easy, secure and effective across many different types of devices.”
What else is Al Ain Finance doing to meet the challenge of delivering a secure, convenient digital banking experience? Download our case study to learn more about this nimble innovator >>