Invent and Simplify

Biometric authentication was released in 2013 on the iphone and later Apple released its FaceID recognition in 2017 in its iphone X which became an industry standard. The first biometric authentication was released in 2004 on a Pantech phone. Biometric authentication and Face ID authentication have universal even before iphone or Samsung incorporated it.

Back in 2007, a startup from Israel Classifeye came up with a software to do biometric authentication using Nokia phone camera. The contactless biometric experience was unique but, ahead of its time. The ability to take a picture of the finger, vein pattern was well ahead of times but, I found an interesting use case in India for a project funded by Gates foundation.

Microcredit lenders needed to collect weekly payments from their borrowers who are illiterate women. The services also extended to transactions in savings account and money transfer. Mobile phones were not as common as today and trust was a key. ATM’s were introduced with biometric authentication and laptops with fingerprint readers were also piloted.

Interestingly, the mobile biometric solution became a viable solution as it did not need power like a laptop and was portable to take to the customer’s doorstep. The app on the phone also provided simple user experience to complete a transaction. Biometric images were small enough to be downloaded and stored on the phone to eliminate the need for network access.

These were days of 2G and flip phones in countries where mobile was still gaining adoption.

The customers of the app were people who worked odd jobs from sowing seeds in the rice field, to sewing clothes or helping their blacksmith husbands. The dirty finger did not work with touch biometric readers. The photo biometric authentication was the solution.

We ran into an interesting twist when people did not trust the biometric authentication. We displayed their name when the identify was verified with biometric and this was still not adequate to gain adoption as most of them were illiterate.

As part of India’s financial regulation to know your customer (KYC), we needed to take a photo of the borrower which was an issue with cultural issue. We had to prove that the photo of women borrowers was not misused which was a hard sell, and then we were able to link their profile with their photo.

To gain adoption, we had multiple data points on their user profile. So, I came up with an idea where the biometric authentication would bring up their profile photo to confirm their identity. A simple user experience where the borrower pointed finger at the phones camera and once authenticated, their profile photo with name showed up to confirm their identity. This was the final straw to gain trust in the system and we started to see high rate of transactions.

Fast forward 2017, nearly a decade later face authentication was introduced on high end phones for everything from unlocking a phone, to installing an app to ApplePay. This contactless authentication is still being improvised in every release.

Privacy and security concerns are being addressed but, back in 2008, we encrypted data with same strength and with lack of privacy laws, we still ensured data was deidentified, with single hash to secure the PII data, mask relevant PII fields with mapping of fields across data base columns. To avoid loss of data with mobile device, we had data only for the day and required fields for transaction. Any new enrollments were done only online with transfer of KYC data overnight to the relevant financial institution.

Although, this story seems outdated, technology can be democratized to gain customer trust without spending $1000.

This journey was about invent and simplify. We hit multiple snags and roadblocks within our swim lanes without much room to increase cost or complicate the technology. What I learned is that when you understand human behavior, their preferences, their comfort zone, you get into designing technology with a human touch. Localizing is key to adoption as the customers like to see their touch in the solution to trust and keep it low cost is a real interesting opportunity. Communication on value proposition is key as we are playing with people’s livelihood where target customers preferred to store cash under their pillow.

So, next time you authenticate yourself with your face, think of someone across the globe trusting the face to improve their livelihood.