1. Technology for Financial Applications of PBI
Having developed a proprietary public biometrics infrastructure (PBI) that provides a reliable method of online personal identification and that works by retrieving private keys from biometric information, Hitachi is using the PBI to provide a secure and convenient authentication platform.
The increasing digitalization of financial services has seen a growing trend toward customers using their smart devices to initiate purchases online, a procedure that in the past would have been done in person or by post. As the initial registration step of PBI involves comparing a camera image against the person’s identification documents, it provides a more rigorous form of online identity verification.
Furthermore, Internet banking in recent years has been adopting Fast Identity Online (FIDO*), which uses biometric authentication in place of traditional passwords. When used together, FIDO and PBI make it possible for users who have lost their smartphone to continue accessing services via their public template stored on a server.
In the future, Hitachi plans to deploy this technology through collaborative creation with customers.