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jmakeryesterday at 9:03 PM4 repliesview on HN

Many consumer banking apps have begun integrating similar identity verification third-party providers. They are very inaccurate.

Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone but doesn’t with another (iPhone 17’s distortion), sometimes it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same video identification flow again, which effectively blocks your money in the account.

I’m closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these video id flows. Simply because it’s way too easy to lose access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is not good enough for this vital requirement, I don’t want to know how they treat other requirements. They simply outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are way too unreliable.


Replies

jbmsftoday at 1:13 AM

I can't speak to the accuracy, but I just integrated stripe's offering for our product (which involves banking). We were small enough for a while not to need it, but eventually the fraudsters find you.

If you don't take these measures, you will lose money to fraud. You may also lose your business because you aren't meeting your AML/anti-terror obligations. (I also just had to take my annual training course).

There are a bunch of mitigations, of which identity verification is just one, and all of them are lousy for our good customers. I wish the banking systems were better and we didn't need to do any of it.

mihaalyyesterday at 9:36 PM

When I researched a bank learning they want to use some third party never-herd-of identification service on me was the moment I knew I do not want to share any of my personal details and consumer habits with that so called bank. They do not care enough to pretend they keep all my data in-house.

show 1 reply
tintoryesterday at 10:22 PM

Can you elaborate on this and tells us which banks?

lossyalgotoday at 12:23 AM

Name and shame please, so that we can avoid these nasty banks. I also hope you leave some bad reviews on TrustPilot.