Our latest Virtual Arena explores the challenges and strategies in place to ensure secure and inclusive customer onboarding while also making the process user friendly.  Financial institutions are cautiously increasing the data collected from customers—both actively and passively—which is used to enhance identity verification and transaction security. Chris Briggs, Chief Product Officer at Mitek Systems and Kathryn Robinson, Commercial Global Lead at NatWest discuss the focus that banks have to enhance security and KYC processes. Briggs and Robinson agree that banks need to reduce friction while ensuring robust security and that digital verification and fraud prevention tools such as biometrics, such as voice, fingerprint or facial recognition, offer quick and efficient processes but these technologies aren’t always available to those without digital resources.  Fraudsters have been exploiting gaps between different banks’ security measures, and moving their tactics to areas of lower resistance, however the inclusion of AI in fraud facilitates both the creation of fraud and its detection through advanced algorithms.  Fraud techniques like face swaps and social engineering are countered by AI-driven checks and secondary verification processes. Biometrics, such as fingerprints, voice facial recognition aim to simplify customer interactions but are not foolproof and require measures like liveness checks and layered fraud prevention strategies.  Deepfakes are a more sophisticated type of fraud that banks are seeing emerge at a very rapid pace and AI chatbots that interact with fraudsters delay their effort and are considered as potential future strategies for direct fraud prevention. Mitek’s solution focuses on minimising false positives and ensuring fraud strategies do not hinder genuine customers, emphasizing that banks must offer inclusive, flexible solutions that cater to diverse customer needs, balancing efficiency and security. The availability of this advanced technology to anyone amplifies the reach and impact of fraud campaigns. A broad-based topic, the world is seeing a lot more emerge in the regulation around AI, biometrics, the use of biometrics and their effectiveness, when they can be used and not. In conclusion, combatting fraud requires continuous adaptation, with a mix of technology and human intervention, customer education, and regulatory compliance.