Biometric Authentication to Stop Money Laundering in Pakistan

Recently The State Bank of Pakistan has mandated all of its banks to start verifying all of their account holders using biometric technology. The goal of this exercise is to stop money laundering in Pakistan.

In the past; opening a bank account only requires the account holder’s details in printed/written form along with their id cards. However, after this current announcement, to open a bank account in Pakistan, one has to provide biometric data using an e-registration system. This procedure is also applicable for those who have registered before without biometric verification process.

Many private banks throughout the globe have already deployed biometric identification solution to reduce fraud at their banks. Biometric technology help banks to know their customers better and revolutionize their KYC process. After implementing the biometric solution from M2SYS for customer identification in the microcredit loan process, this helped Grupo Monge (Costa Rican Capital Corporation) to rest assured that no one is exploiting the loan system by assuming the identity of another individual. Since the deployment of biometric identification solution, Grupo Monge has enrolled over half a million microcredit loan customers and seen over a 10% reduction in customer fraud and no recoverable cases.

The Implementation of biometric authentication is a breakthrough step for Pakistan in its fight against financial crime. This deployment will help the Pakistani government to escalate the effectiveness of financial intelligence through proper investigation and prosecution of money laundering and terrorist financing. After this biometric deployment, there will be no fake and unknown accounts.

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