Identity verification in the banking sector presents a challenge: How do you confirm someone’s identity without driving away customers through cumbersome checks?
Security Bank is grappling with this issue while also keeping an eye on the evolving cyberthreat landscape, which continues to grow in both scale and sophistication. As part of its digital transformation efforts, the bank has adopted enhanced identity verification measures to streamline the digital onboarding of customers.
“We want to provide a much better banking experience for our customer base, and we want to do this through mobile-first,” said Malcolm Yow, Senior Vice President and Retail CTO at Security Bank, in an interview with Frontier Enterprise. “Last year, we launched a new digital mobile platform for retail, and this year we’re launching it for corporate and small business segments as well. With that, we have a new project to put our onboarding onto our mobile platform. What we are looking for is to ensure that we have a very seamless digital experience with strong security as well.”
Banking on transformation
According to Yow, the bank’s previous onboarding solution, a web-based platform, had become outdated and in need of replacement.
“When you use web browsers, it’s clunky. The camera quality on web browsers is not that strong,” he remarked.
With mobile phones now ubiquitous, customers can register for an account or link an existing one to a banking app with just a few taps. Security Bank sought an identity verification solution capable of meeting the expectations set by this shift.
“We were also concerned with false accuracy rates. A lot of the time when you’re assessing identity verification solutions, you really want to check how often they return inaccurate results. And then with the Philippine market, deepfakes and fraudulent IDs are something of a big concern for us. We wanted to ensure that when we do another selection of a product, we do look at the biometrics and the deepfakes,” Yow said.
The bank issued a formal request for proposal, evaluating about 15 products. The solution needed to meet requirements across several areas: usability, technology, security, and ease of implementation.
“We also assessed the companies, not just their technology. We went through a couple of product demonstrations, and then we carried out proof of concept (POC) testing with the top three vendors we narrowed down,” Yow said.
Workflow flexibility was another key consideration.
“We wanted to test the journey and how flexible it is. One of our goals is to increase self-sufficiency; to rely more on our own engineers and build internal capability, while still having a strong partner to support us along the way,” he added.
Following nearly a month of testing, Security Bank selected Entrust to support fraud detection and identity verification using its Onfido Studio platform.
“They were looking for a customer-first approach: How seamless of a user experience can we give to the customer, but at the same time, how can we stop the fraudsters from entering the platform?” said Harvinder Singh, Regional Vice President Sales APAC, Identity Security at Entrust.
Entrust’s role focused on optimising user experience while developing robust fraud prevention mechanisms at the onboarding stage.
“In our experience, many companies introduce too much friction at the start of the onboarding process, leading to high dropout rates. Customers often find these systems difficult to navigate and feel deterred rather than encouraged to continue,” Singh said.
Platform for trust
One issue raised by Security Bank was the number of IDs typically required for identity verification on mobile apps, especially banking platforms, which often causes unnecessary friction for users.
“How many IDs do you really need to ask a customer?” Yow said.
To address this, Entrust deployed facial recognition models that analyse biometric data in real time, ensuring that the individual verifying their identity is physically present and authentic.
“What we ask for is just the front and back of a valid ID, along with a facial scan. Our system checks that there’s a match between the ID and the person in front of the camera,” said Singh. “Our lie detection models assess liveness and confirm the identity isn’t being spoofed or manipulated. If fraud is detected, the attempt is flagged and blocked, but legitimate users are able to complete onboarding smoothly.”
Beyond deepfakes, Security Bank is also contending with a rise in tampered identity documents. Yow acknowledged that testing for every possible variation is difficult to manage in-house, which makes external expertise critical.
“The good thing with Entrust is that they’ve been in the Philippines for a while. What you really need is data, and a lot of it, to capture those nuances and fraudulent patterns more effectively,” he said.
AI versus AI
Deepfakes pose a growing threat in the banking sector, as demonstrated by a multi-million dollar scam in Hong Kong last year. In response, institutions are turning to AI to combat AI-powered fraud.
Singh shared that Entrust has developed the Fraud Lab, which generates synthetic identity documents and deepfake facial videos to train its machine learning models for fraud detection at the onboarding stage.
“For example, liveness detection technology ensures that the person interacting with the system is physically present, rather than a manipulated image or video. It’s a form of AI-driven pattern analysis. The platform continuously refines its fraud detection algorithms to identify inconsistencies typical of deepfake-generated faces, such as unnatural lighting, irregular facial movements, or pixel distortion. We continue building those models into the Fraud Lab,” he explained.
Yow, meanwhile, underscored the need for human oversight when deploying AI-based tools, especially to avoid false rejections.
“If you rely entirely on AI, you risk rejecting legitimate customers. You need human checks as well, which Entrust provides. We conducted POC testing with them and even created rudimentary fake IDs ourselves, just to see if the system could detect them,” he said.
Investing in the future
Security Bank and Entrust are in the implementation phase, with plans to launch the digital onboarding feature later this year.
“We’ve already implemented some of the journeys and tested Entrust’s tool. We’ve built the workflows into Onfido Studio, and the next step is to integrate it into our mobile app. It’s actually quite straightforward,” Yow said.
As part of its broader digital transformation, Security Bank has rolled out several “platform enablers” — foundational technologies designed to support digital services across its various segments, including health, consumer, corporate, and small business.
“One of the key trends we’ve seen globally is the shift away from reliance on core systems or records. When you decouple from legacy systems, you can move faster. It also enables data enrichment and creates a strong data platform for analytics and capabilities like next-best-offer recommendations,” Yow said.
The bank is also exploring embedded finance and open banking.
“Open banking standards and frameworks need to evolve to become more coherent and accessible. A large part of that will be built into our soon-to-be-launched digital platform, which will support multiple customer segments. I think we’ll be one of the first in the Philippines to do that,” he added.
Entrust, meanwhile, is working on strengthening post-onboarding security through step-up authentication, citing the limitations of one-time passwords.
“For example, if a customer is onboarded using document and biometric verification on day one — that’s the new KYC journey. But on day five or six, when they’re applying for a credit or debit card, we use biometric step-up authentication as a second layer of verification. That way, you can trust the customer before issuing any products or services,” Singh said.
