AI digital identity services provider Element has recently joined forces with Brankas, a global open finance technology provider, as the latter attempts to add fraud detection solutions to its service offerings.
According to the company’s official press release, one in every three people in Southeast Asia has experienced online fraud amidst the digital transformation in 2022. According to ResearchAndMarkets, the global market for fraud detection and prevention is estimated to have reached US$19.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach a revised size of US$46.4 billion by 2026.
Online fraud, meanwhile, has since emerged as a top critical enterprise risk for Southeast Asia-based businesses. These findings are on top of the US$260 million that they have already lost in 2019 due to digital fraud.
Protecting consumer data, confidentiality and financing
Brankas is an Open Finance API platform that seeks to encourage the growth of the MSMEs in the Asia-Pacific region. It provides financial access to the underserved while at the same time protecting consumer data, confidentiality, and financing via its products and services.
On the other hand, Element is expected to play a critical role in the identity verification layer for Brankas’ Open Finance products such as its Brankas Direct or Statement.
Open Finance is based on the principle that data supplied by and created on behalf of financial services customers are owned and controlled by those customers. Re-use of this data by other providers can only take place in a safe and ethical environment with informed consumer consent.
Direct, the first service to be offered under the partnership, is currently available in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Businesses can replace manual bank transfers as a checkout option, enable direct e-wallet top-ups, and expedite loan repayments to multiple banks via a single flow. This allows merchants to speed up day-to-day transactions, freeing up that time spent manually reconciling data for further innovation and customer-centric activities.
For instance, when a user is making a payment using Brankas Direct, they can authenticate themselves using Element’s liveness detection product. This provides an additional layer of security on top of OTP, making transactions more secure.
Capitalizing on Element’s extensive eKYC capabilities
In addition to this, Brankas is now also exploring ways to capitalize on Element’s extensive eKYC (Electronic Know Your Customer) capabilities to complement its composable cloud-native core banking system, the Brankas Open Core.
This enables a reportedly better onboarding process for customers opening new bank accounts or loan management solutions using the Brankas core banking solution.
According to Todd Schweitzer, the CEO and co-founder of Brankas, Element has the most comprehensive eKYC offering in the region, localised for specific markets. Their liveness check products and connectivity central databases for identity checks can make Brankas’ Open Banking products more prepared against fraud.
For its part, the CEO and co-founder of Element stated that Brankas has been a leader in open finance and continues to advocate for adoption across the region.
Element is currently looking forward to supporting open finance products to make the onboarding and authentication process easier and safer for the company’s end-users, and this new product can pave the way for more use cases in the future.