CBN heeds Heritage Bank boss thought on identity crisis, plans BVN upgrade
Barely few days after the Managing Director of Heritage Bank, Mr Ifie Sekibo raised an issue of urgent identity security importance; the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has opened up on upgrading security of Bank Verification Number (BVN).
Director of Payments System Management Department at the apex bank, Mr. Sam Okojere disclosed in a recent interview that plans are underway to introduce finger-vein biometrics and tie individuals’ phone numbers to International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) as part of the fight against cybercrime and identity fraud.
He said the new smart move is to safeguard the payment system by frustrating the activities of cyber fraudsters who clone the identity of their victims during account hacking and related illicit digital crimes.
Okojere averred that “We are upgrading the BVN to be the digital identity as far as payment is concerned. We are upgrading the biometric to veins. We are creating and tracing the App for it because, depending on the kind of job that you do, the finger tips, unlike the veins, may wear out. So we are lifting the biometric to the vein level so that it will be stronger”.
Fact checks by Business Hilights showed that finger vein recognition is used in the majority of bank branches in Japan, but Barclays is reportedly the first UK bank to roll out the technology.
Additional details revealed that finger vein recognition works by shining an invisible near-infrared light through the finger. The light is absorbed by hemoglobin in the blood of the veins, and the pattern is then captured by a sensor below the finger. As an internal biometric, it is difficult to replicate, and it is insensitive to such factors as dirt, sweat, grease or a surface injury.
He stressed that at moment the new security features are in place, cases of SIM swap would die a natural death.
The Finger Vein Authentication Technology (Vein ID), on its part, is technology derived from medical scanning and it is being used by few banks across the globe in the fight against cybercrime and identity fraud.
In 2014, Barclays Bank announced its Biometric Reader for corporate banking customers, which uses Hitachi’s Finger Vein Authentication Technology (Vein ID).
Okojere assured that “In the next couple of months, the issue of SIM swap will die a natural death. What we are working on is to tie a phone number of individuals to the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity). Even if somebody steals your phone or your SIM card, he cannot use it on another device. Within that phone, we are coming with an App.If somebody steals your phone, go to another person, just send only a code. That thing will distribute to the national security adviser, the payment system, the banks etc. They can’t use that number and they can’t sell that phone. We are working on that.”
Before the revelation by the CBN, Sekibo had at a recent 2019 Annual Conference of Finance Correspondents Association of Nigeria (FICAN) in Lagos noted that even though BVN has been able to create a form of identification in the country; it has not been able to address some of the issues around identity management in the country.
He called on the federal government to work towards creating a credible and strong identity management system that can guarantee strong security for banks to expand access to credit amongst Nigerians.
It would be recalled that the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) statutorily mandated to drive the harmonization of all the nation’s identity systems including Drivers’’ Licence, NIN, BVN, SIM registration, International Passport and others had been engulfed with funding crisis coupled with contract issues with Chams PLc which boxed it to only the issuance of National Identity Number (NIN) instead of real National ID Card and effective harmonization of identity platforms in Nigeria.
Identity experts had argued that as far as the nation’s identity systems continued to remain multifaceted, it would be hard arrive at an authentic and credible citizens’ identification status.
Armed with the above analogy, in his presentation at FICAN workshop in Lagos, Sekibo observed that up till today in Nigeria, lack of identity-powered tracking of individuals relocating from one place to another without notifying anyone remains a major issue in access to credit.
