The Biometric Banking Revolution

You only have to look through the newspapers of late to see that the biometrics revolution is well and truly entering the mainstream. From voice recognition, to fingerprint and retina scanning, many industries are poised to, and in some cases, already benefiting from new authentication technologies. 

No sector is experiencing this new wave of identity-defined authentication quite like the finance and retail banking sectors. High-profile banks and financial organisations such as RBS, Nationwide MasterCard and HSBC have taken significant measures to put their customers’ identity firmly at the centre of new security policies. It’s this approach, matched with the latest in technological innovations, that will and should be implemented across a variety of sectors.

All that matters is not getting fined

Spending all your time firefighting

A common question we at IBS ask is, why do banks continually plump for older core systems?

Why do so many other banks focus on the time-honoured activities of patching up their existing software rather than tearing it all out and starting afresh?

There are a number of reasons for this, and they are well enough rehearsed.

Why do banks have so many staff?

Rabobank HQ interior

I had my first visit to Rabobank’s new headquarters in Utrecht last week (locally dubbed the ‘binoculars’, due to the exterior look, while inside it is undeniably Dutch-style funky - http://www.sander.nl/en/sander-architecten-international/clients/companies/rabobank-nederland.aspx).


However, my meeting was in one of the bank’s other offices in the city, accessed by a Rabobank people-carrier, shuttling between the two complexes. Which gave me time to ponder, why do banks have so many staff? The new HQ certainly looks large but it is insufficient to house all of the bank’s staff in Utrecht. In total, Rabobank has 61,000 full-time employees. What do they all do?