Nordea Taps Veridium for Biometric Security

When it comes to banks, security is perhaps more important than everything else. This is why we commonly associate doors made of foot-thick steel and deadbolts larger than a human thumb with banks. Software is changing the face of bank security, and Nordea is leading the way here by bringing in Veridium’s 4 Fingers TouchlessID system to replace a current system of tokenization.

Nordea—one of northern Europe’s leading financial services operations with about 11 million private and 700,000 corporate customers—turned to Veridium as part of a larger initiative to bring in multi-factor authentication featuring biometrics to its overall operations, built right into the data management process.

The move to biometrics, interestingly enough, doesn’t appear to be customer-facing, but rather for internal employee use as a means to protect “high privileged access” to both confidential and secure data. But customers will likely benefit here not only from the better protection, but also from improved ease of use and a lower total cost to Nordea itself.

Since the system being put in place can be both scaled to meet needs and customized accordingly, it should provide the framework for long-term use, providing better security and accountability in data management.

Veridium’s CEO, James Stickland, noted “Maintaining customer, employee and company data is critical for all organizations – but especially those in the financial industry. With Veridium, Nordea will be able to take its first steps in advancing security for high privilege access and GDPR compliance. We’re delighted Nordea has selected Veridium for their security and authentication needs and look forward to continuing this partnership.”

Mobile payments, and by extension mobile banking, has long had a security problem. Customers have prioritized security almost to the point of fetishism, and businesses have been hard-pressed to respond accordingly, particularly in an era of increasing data breaches. This has produced some excellent developments, like tokenization and biometric security, and though this development doesn’t bring biometric authentication to the customer, it does put their sensitive personal information behind an even better vault: the one that can be opened with a recognized employee’s fingerprints.

This in turn should make mobile banking safer, as well as regular banking, a point that dovetails nicely with the classic image of a bank as being a building with a giant steel box inside it.