GBG offer new mobile to person matching service

The world of consumer banking and financial services has been revolutionised by the mobile phone. Our digital lives are becoming increasingly focused on the small screen in our palm, and the convenience and speed of mobile banking is such that around 80% of UK citizens now use mobile banking services to manage their finances. However, as always in the fast-moving world of online technology, where convenience and innovation lead, fraud and scamming will follow, creating a problem of such a scale that in 2020 the UK banking industry stopped £1.6 billion of unauthorised fraud losses in that year alone, equivalent to £6.73 in every £10 of attempted fraud being stopped (source: UK Finance).

With mobile devices now at the centre of our digital lives, the need to protect banks and their customers from online fraud has never been greater. The good news is that new tools are available to counter this threat, driven by innovation from within the mobile industry, that enable us to use mobile phone and network data to provide mobile signal intelligence capability to protect our clients and their customers. Whether that is through use of the mobile network connection to seamlessly authenticate a user into a service, or the flagging of potential fraud through identification of a recent SIM card change, there are technologies now available to proactively address, securely and in real-time, a range of potential mobile fraud threats before they occur.

A key part of the mobile signal intelligence toolkit is our new Mobile to Person Match capability. The convenience of online mobile banking is partly that we are no longer required to visit a branch to set up or manage our financial affairs, but in this world the opportunity for the bank to ID-verify the user directly is removed, which creates a problem. How do I, as a provider of online banking services, know exactly who is using my service, and whether I can trust them? Mobile to Person Match uses the mobile number of an end-customer (required by all online banking services as a key piece of personal information) and matches the name, address and date of birth of the bank customer with the data held by their mobile operator. By using the mobile operator data as a verification source, the bank has access to a trusted, secure second opinion through which to verify the identity of their customer within the onboarding flow or during a transaction request.

GBG now offer the Mobile to Person Match service to customers across Europe alongside our suite of other mobile signal intelligence services. Available through a single API in UK and France with other European and global markets to follow, it can be simply and quickly integrated into existing customer flows to enhance and enable customer ID verification for GBG clients.

Mobile to Person Match, and the full suite of GBG mobile signal intelligence services, is available to test and integrate today.