Banks are leading the way when it comes to consumer trust in protecting and securing data.

Consumer trust has been shaken by scams, the number of which have rocketed since the pandemic. Our own research corroborates the scale of the problem with consumers saying they receive three scam messages a day – more than from friends and family, with half (49%) of UK consumers admitting they don’t report fraudulent messages.

With the rise in scammers and fraudsters pretending to be trusted organisations online and finding ever-ingenious ways to take advantage of people, trust is diminishing. Recent research from UK Finance found that more than £1.3billion was stolen by con artists last year via authorised push payment fraud.

The rise in consumer mistrust

One avenue rife with fraudsters leading to an uptick in consumer mistrust, is social media. These platforms are a breeding ground for bad actors to execute scams due to their lack of accountability when it comes to proper identity verification. However, we are seeing consumers place trust in organisations who have played a reassuring and important role in the pandemic such as banks. 

Banks are clearly leading the way when it comes to trust, with 60% of those surveyed in our recent Digital Trust research saying that they trust banks to protect and secure their data - whereas only 16% of consumers trust social media companies to do the same. 

These high levels of trust are largely because banks verify a person at account creation. Then authenticating that same person throughout their online journey, from log in to executing transactions.

How to rebuild consumer trust from the bottom up 

This begs the question - how can other organisations follow in the footsteps of banks to successfully build trust between consumers and businesses and engender more faith in online processes? In our experience, they follow four steps:

1.    Secure an online presence

It is essential for business leaders to implement technology which confirms their customers’ identity online. Almost everyone now has an online presence – it’s time we started taking our identity there as seriously as we do in the physical world.

By asking the right questions, organisations can ensure they have the right solutions in place to create a secure online presence, which allows them to identify bots, malware, compromised devices, suspicious locations or activity, securing a user’s digital identity and their online assets. 

2. Positively identify

Once an organisation has identified that they have a secure session and are interacting with a human, they need to confirm that the human is real and verified - not fake - and that they are allowed to do what they are asking to do. Technology like behavioural biometrics positively identifies genuine users rather than just identifying potential fraud, because a fraudster with the right username and password looks like a genuine user.

By passively drawing on thousands of behavioural data points unique to the individual, this more dynamic technique applies increased scrutiny to each user’s activity, allows for a smoother user experience, and builds a digital identity for each person. 

3.    Multi-layered approach

 To take this a step further, layering the contextual data - including device, threat detection, and cryptography - along with behavioural biometrics to positively identify users means there is less reliance on a small amount of evidence - or a single point of failure.

This multi-layered approach of positive identification implements an innocent until proven guilty stance because it means genuine users can log-in until there’s a real reason for concern.

4.    Security, not surveillance

Behavourial biometric technology is event based, and doesn’t rely on cookies to identify people. Data can be obfuscated by organisations to protect user privacy at the same time.

A layered approach to securing digital identities offers an effective solution without invading individual user privacy, and without increasing friction in the user experience.

Other industries and the public sector have much to learn from the more robust identification processes that already exist in the financial sector. And there’s no time to waste - our research found the development of digital trust, of which secure digital identity is key building block, has the potential to add £134bn to UK GDP during global economic slowdown. There’s a clear opportunity here for all businesses to follow in banks’ footsteps and build better consumer trust.