Jumio's Bala Kumar on KYC and Using a Holistic Approach for ID Verification

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:01]foreign thank you so much for joining FF news's coverage of money 2020 Vegas how are you doing doing pretty good thank you for having me here it's an absolute pleasure can you tell our viewers Your Role at Gmail and a bit about jumia please absolutely my name is Bala Kumar I'm the chief product officer at jumia I've been here with the company for almost two years at this point in time has brought in to help with laying out the vision and strategy for the organization incredible now with that strategy let's look at the importance of kyc and the strategy going forward I think kyc is obviously knowing your customer and everything around that has been such a critical part of the chat in the industry recently um what areas of verification are the most difficult to obtain for financial institutions to help their business customers it's very important to frame this conversation especially with the covet pandemic a lot of businesses have gone into a faceless Channel and folks have been working through digital media for quite a while now in this faceless channel it's really important to be able to understand who you're doing business with which is why kyc is very critical for organizations and one it's for businesses to know who they're working with to from a Regulatory Compliance standpoint there are a lot of regulations across different regions that require customers to perform the right due diligence in figuring out who they're who they're working with so kyc is very critical to get the right kyc solution in place you need to be looking at a very holistic view of individuals it's not about just one or two attributes if you think about an individual you got a name you have an address there's an email phone device a government issued idea driver's license a passport Etc so there's so many attributes about about individuals oftentimes companies are looking at just a handful of these attributes by leveraging a solution that looks much more holistically you have a full 360 degree view of that individual that gives you increased confidence that you're doing business to the right people definitely now over the last two years as well we've seen businesses regrow their Global expansion we've seen FIS enable business customers to transact across the world but also with the pandemic we've seen a massive increase in fraud and especially when companies are dealing across border payments and everything like that so what are some of the common types of fraud that are affecting the industry and is there a pattern and what tools can you help FIS use to crack down on cyber security forces are a sophisticated lot we shouldn't kid ourselves about it every time there's an opportunity they're going to be knocking on the door the pandemic has given them that opening especially as I said earlier companies going to a faceless digital channel it's opened up the dose for fraudsters to try and get their foot in the door so frosties are constantly trying to evolve their attack vectors we have seen simple amateur fraud attacks where they're just reusing email IDs reusing devices these are very easy to catch but we are also seeing a lot of sophisticated fraud we see a lot of IDs that are digitally manipulated so you'll see the same ID with different faces different document numbers coming through at the face of it these look like real IDs but in reality these are not and that's where Solutions like what jumia brings to Market helps quite a lot because we can detect that digital manipulation of that ID so it's not just about again like I said that holistic view looking at a combination of what email ID is associated with this transaction what devices use for this transaction what IDE was submitted for this transaction allows us to stitch all these different attributes together then we see the same device showing up with a different ID multiple times we know there's something fishy going on there right so it's always about looking holistically across multiple attributes and then figuring out what this posture needs to be incredible now I think if you look at uh the way that fraud has reacted to the pandemic in a holistic way you you can kind of bar down and see that maybe it was the human element the consumer at the end of the chain that has become the weakest Lincoln said chain so how have you seen changes to where the consumer deals before for instance with multi-factor authentication the onus is suddenly back on the consumer what are you seeing in terms of friction there absolutely when you try to keep fraud says out of the equation you end up putting friction in the path of good consumers when you think about it 95 96 percent of transactions are good people it's only two to four percent of the transactions that are Bad actors but in trying to keep those two to four percent out you're actually putting friction in the path of the 96 97 percent of the population right and so it's very important for any solution out there to provide find that right balance between friction for the Bad actors and allowing the good actors good people come through the door I always use the analogy of TSA Pre what experience do you want to have when you go through airport security do you want to go through the line where you have to take your shoes off your laptop out of the bag your military sort of the bag or do you want to go through TSA pre-check where you're just walking through here and you're through the security line in 30 seconds or less right our goal is to provide that frictionless experience for consumers and the way you do it is by looking at the holistic view of that individual from an in-consumer standpoint every time they run into friction they're generally going to abandon the process and they're going to go knock on some of the door where the process is much more easier again back to airport security people will pay that extra dollar to go through TSA pre-check because they want that convenience right so there's a direct impact on consumers when you start putting fraud deterrence in the path of any transaction multi-factor authentication is one of the tools folks use there's some it worked really well in the early days when you're using multi-factor authentication through email IDs or phone numbers but process have figured that out through Sim swapping and other mechanisms they've been able to hack through that as well not as rampant yet but there are folks who have figured that out and it's not going to be too long before they start spreading that knowledge just like we spread knowledge among good people Frost is also shared information amongst their own kin and so it's important to start bringing in additional layers of authentication without introducing friction for the good people fascinating because yeah you make a great point you know that the fraudsters are ever evolving if we just improve increase the friction to make ourselves more secure we're eventually going to get to a process where no one wants to pay for anything so we're focused we focused the last question on consumers I think we should stay there and consumers have often been giving away their you know private data to a lot of companies allowing fraudsters To Rule The Roost how can we win the trust of the consumers back again and really work out how to save customers data and improve security at the same time I think uh consumers on one hand because of social networks they're out there sharing a lot of their personal information my own family my sister she puts a lot of information on Facebook for example right and I constantly have to keep cautioning her about how much of a personal data she's putting out there so this one angle through which information is getting out there let's not forget the uh data breaches that are also occurring right there's a lot of companies that have been impacted by data breaches and a ton of information that's out there so it's very easy I guarantee your information my information a bunch of information is out there in the dark web so if a flots just wants to submit a transaction in our names they easily can they can get the name address email form but some of the things that they cannot get are things like our driver's license at our passports Etc right so especially in this data breach environment it is important to have additional verification authentication controls to be able to make sure that the person who's submitting the transaction is actually the person who's or persisting the driver's license as well so you look for position and not just the quality of the information that is provided right so that's where companies like jumio when we bring that ID verification capability to the equation we are able to look at what's the risk of the name address what's the risk of the email what's the risk of the phone and by the way is all that information tied to this individual who's owning the driver's license add to that a selfie that we take that allows us to match the biometric information of the picture that's on the ID as well it's very rare that a fraudster is going to be forcing for a selfie right and so you do you uh people are actually getting more comfortable with biometric information right with face unlock on your phone Etc five years ago eight years ago books are a little uncomfortable with it no longer the case now right the best iPhones and the Android devices are they support face unlock so folks are used to looking at their cameras and unlocking devices so when they are asked to post for a selfie when they're going through an account opening scenario or if they're trying trying to transfer big amounts of funds from their bank accounts they're totally open with sharing their biometric information as well so we've gotten to a place in the world where people are comfortable sharing some of this information as long as it is handled responsibly and as long as the data is secure perfect thank you so much balance it's been absolute pleasure cheers thank you [Music]