“With the current pandemic, banks and financial institutions need technologies and solutions in place that can scale and get up and running in a matter of hours while balancing a seamless customer experience”, expressed Charbel George Diab, Managing Director – OneSpan Middle East FZE and Regional Sales Director – Middle East, Africa, Turkey, Central Asia and Pakistan at OneSpan, during an exclusive Q&A session with our Editor in Chief on the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on the overall financial industry and shared his insights on what changes have digitization brought in the market space globally.
1. What actions have you taken to keep your staff safe and how are you ensuring to provide better customer service to your clients during the pandemic?
Early on in the pandemic, OneSpan put its employees’ health and safety first and enabled its global team to work remotely. The team has thrived in this environment, working closely together across time zones to help ensure business continuity for our customers. Between answering inquiries and delivering additional products and services to enable remote banking, OneSpan has maintained its customer-first focus throughout this time.
2. What digital and remote services you are offering to the industry to keep them productive?
Around the world, people now rely more than ever on online banking portals, mobile banking apps, and other remote banking channels – even for interactions that would traditionally involve a visit to a branch or a face-to-face meeting. OneSpan’s digital banking technologies, including e-signatures, digital identity verification, mobile app security and authentication, enable remote processes for both new customer onboarding and ongoing relationship management, while protecting customers from digital fraud.
3. As companies are maintaining physical distance, how are you supporting them with your products and offerings?
Banks are seeing sharp increases in digital channel banking activities and hacking attacks. Our global banking customers are telling us this, and it is evident in various studies as well. For example, a recent JD Power study found online banking logins grew 40% month over month in the first three weeks of April. The study also found that many people surveyed began using mobile banking for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic started. We are seeing an uptick in OneSpan’s e-signature solution, OneSpan Sign and OneSpan’s mobile security solution, Mobile Security Suite, in response to COVID-19. We believe these increased demands of our technology are an acceleration of longer-term financial services industry trends.
4. Since work from home is becoming a new normal, digital adoption is increasing during the pandemic, do you think it is having extraordinary impact on the cyber security and subjecting to new range of threats in the digital space? How can we mitigate such risks?
A recent report by Aite Group interviewed fraud executives at North American financial institutions and found that most expect to see increases in online and mobile fraud losses this year. One large financial institution revised its fraud loss projection from a decrease of 8% before the pandemic to an increase of 10% to 15% now. Digital banking, fraud prevention, and secure account opening technologies can mitigate fraud and increase security, all while providing an improved digital customer experience across digital channels.
5. What are the challenges the industry is facing due to the pandemic?
With the current pandemic, banks and financial institutions need technologies and solutions in place that can scale and get up and running in a matter of hours while balancing a seamless customer experience. OneSpan’s anti-fraud and e-signature solutions give banks a quick an easy way to implement security measures without compromising the customer experience.
