Back to Blog

Work From Home, Identity Crime, and the Two Biggest Threats to FIs in 2022

Work From Home, Identity Crime, and the Two Biggest Threats to FIs in 2022

Finovate Research Analyst David Penn sat down with Simon Marchand, Chief Fraud Prevention Officer at Nuance to talk about the current state of financial crime, what banks are particularly worried about, and the benefits of using voice as a key biometric identifier in the authentication and verification process.

“What I focus on is making sure that Nuance’s voice biometrics technology can be applied very specifically to track down fraudsters. One of the main challenges when you try to stop any kind of fraud is finding the human beings that are pretending to be someone else. What we do is identify the human beings (which) allows fraud teams to find the fraudsters themselves and prevent fraud much more easily and much more effectively. I’m here to make sure that Nuance’s expertise is applied in the best possible ways to stop and prevent any kind of identity crimes.”

On the top concerns for financial institutions when it comes to identity crime in 2022.

“The first is that we’re still going to have a lot of employees working from home … If you’re working from home, you’re not only easier to manipulate and socially engineer from a fraudster’s perspective, but also you’re alone, unsupervised, and have access to a lot of very sensitive information. Banks are very concerned about how they can protect their customers privacy and personal information as effectively in a work from home environment as they would do in an in-person environment.”

“The other big threat is that fraudsters are quite significantly shifting to account takeovers and subscription frauds – very identity-focused crimes. They have adapted very, very rapidly during the pandemic and they have seen that it’s very profitable to focus on those specific attack vectors. They are moving away, especially in the U.S., from those card-not-present kinds of fraud, card skimming, and all these things that we have been fighting for a couple of years, and it looks as if 2021 is on track to be the worst year in the past 20 years when it comes to the number of identity theft victims in the U.S. So fraudsters are moving toward (the new crimes) and we need to move quickly if (we) want to make sure that we’re protecting our customers.”

Watch the full interview below.

Find out more about Nuance and the work they do >>


Photo by Shelby Waltz from Pexels