GIACT and Mastercard Team to Provide Secure Account Verification

Mastercard and GIACT have joined forces to offer customers secure account verification.

The partnership expands on GIACT digital identity and fraud solutions to allow “businesses to use a multi-method approach to verify account information for over 95% of U.S. deposit accounts,” the company announced Tuesday (March 7).

According to a GIACT news release, the U.K. company — owned by the London Stock Exchange Group — will use Mastercard’s open banking technology to offer account verification solutions to its customer and third-party risk businesses.

These clients will be able to let their customers verify an array of information within a single bank account, thus meeting their needs faster and more reliably.

“Digital acceleration has changed how people think about money and what they expect from financial services,” Andy Sheehan, Mastercard’s EVP, U.S. Open Banking, said in the release.

For example, it’s led customers to demand more secure and user-friendly online identity verification, as reported here Tuesday.

PYMNTS’ latest research shows that 36% of banking customers want their financial institutions (FIs) to offer more visible security measures for high-risk financial activities. And a bulk of these consumers say that additional visible security measures make their assets and personal information more secure.

Meanwhile, the same research found that consumers want to play a more active role in protecting their money and identity, even when it comes to everyday financial activities.

Twenty-seven percent of banking consumers told PYMNTS they want their FIs to provide additional visible security measures for routine digital activities, with 30% looking for added security when accessing bank accounts.

And 29% want more security when sending or receiving money, with 27% seeking these measures making purchases. That’s all according to “Visible and Invisible Security: Perceptions in Digital Banking,” a PYMNTS and Entersekt collaboration.

PYMNTS also reported Tuesday on the rise of digital banking in GIACT’s home country, noting that this increase in popularity may be due to the U.K.’s high level of digital engagement.

Surveying more than 30,000 consumers in 11 countries, PYMNTS’ December ConnectedEconomy Index, “How the World Does Digital,” is a comprehensive look at the state of global digital transformation into day-to-day activities. The U.K.’s high engagement trajectory has been a key marker in the index’s analysis, especially when comparing Europe’s transformation rates.

The survey found that the U.K. can claim the highest engagement in monthly and weekly digital activities across all countries the index tracks, coming in a very tight second next to Singapore in terms of share of consumers participating in digital activities each day.