By Andy Cease, Product Marketing Manager, Entrust

Although the use of contactless payments has steadily increased, the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed contactless toward mainstream adoption. An August 2020 survey found that one in five consumers used contactless payments for the first time during the pandemic. Many believe this technology is essential moving forward, even after the pandemic subsides. In fact, according to a study by Entrust, 83% of respondents believe contactless cards are here to stay with 70% reporting they prefer contactless payment for sanitary reasons.

While contactless cards provide some solace for consumers worried about the risk of contracting the virus from payment devices, banks can go a step further and implement additional technology that will improve both customer and employee experience during the pandemic. Like contactless payments, the three technologies listed below may achieve mainstream adoption due to COVID-19, but their various advantages mean they’ll likely have long-term staying power in the financial services industries.

1. ID proofing authenticates identity remotely.

With COVID-19 cases surging across the U.S., many customers are limiting in-person visits to stores and other facilities, including bank branches. Unfortunately, many banks still require customers to physically visit a branch to open a new account or access certain services due to the difficulty of authenticating identity online.

You can help your customers stay safe by adopting ID proofing technology, which authenticates customers’ identities from a mobile device. The customer uses their device to photograph a government-issued photo ID, then takes a selfie for comparison via facial recognition technology. The user is then verified, denied or issued a challenge to further test their identity based on rules set by your company.

It’s important to note that ID proofing won’t work for every customer in every situation. No facial recognition algorithm is perfect, and many identify certain types of faces more accurately than others. A genuine user could fail the facial recognition test due to poor lighting when their selfie was taken, or their physical appearance may no longer match their photo ID. Some customers lack official photo IDs or mobile devices with facial recognition capabilities.

That being said, the AI engines that refine these algorithms are getting better by the day, and soon ID proofing will enable everyone to open new accounts and access services without leaving their homes. This capability will continue to show dividends after the pandemic by making your customer experience more streamlined and convenient, removing friction from the account onboarding experience.

ID proofing involves collecting sensitive personal information, including biometric data. As such, it’s important to protect customers’ privacy by partnering with security providers that prioritize protecting personal data, as well as implementing strong cryptography strategies to avoid data breaches and other disruptions. Customers also deserve to know how their sensitive data is stored and used. Be transparent about your bank’s data practices and make sure you’re compliant with all current data privacy legislation.

2. Instant card issuance enables faster onboarding.

As we move toward a more on-demand future, customers will continue to want things instantly, including their payment cards. With instant card issuance, customers can drive to their banks and pick up a new card right away, rather than waiting several days for it to arrive in the mail. To minimize contact during the pandemic, banks can offer drive-thru, touchless instant issuance, so customers don’t even have to step inside the bank. Then, they can immediately start using their new chip-equipped card for safe, contactless payments.

Instant card issuance is relatively easy to adopt: All you need is an instant card printer and either an on-premises or cloud-hosted software stack. Look for one with a user-friendly interface that’s able to handle multiple card designs, including both credit and debit card profiles. Your printer should also include cybersecurity protections including secure booting, malware detection and encryption of user certificates to protect sensitive data.

As more customers look to adopt contactless cards during and after the pandemic, this technology will be particularly important for banks to address that need. And we also expect that instant card issuance will continue to be popular in the post-COVID-19 world, for both sanitation and convenience purposes.

3. Single sign-on authentication streamlines employee access.

Creating and remembering secure passwords is a major burden for bank employees and customers alike. Financial information is incredibly sensitive and requires the highest levels of protection, but the strongest passwords are often the hardest to remember. And if a user needs to remember multiple passwords to access different services or accounts — or secure areas of a building — the difficulty is multiplied, and so is the potential for password theft or password fatigue.

Single sign-on (SSO) authentication alleviates this difficulty by tying access to multiple accounts to one password. Bank employees can sign in once on a mobile phone or device and gain access to computers, networks or areas of the bank building without the need to manage multiple passwords. By removing the need to type passcodes into keypads for room access, SSO can reduce opportunities for COVID-19 transmission among employees at work. It also streamlines the login and authentication process, improving productivity.

Most importantly, though, by eliminating the need to remember multiple passwords, SSO makes it easier for an employee to create a single, strong password to manage all their accounts. But with SSO, cracking one password can give a bad actor access to multiple platforms, so it’s especially important to avoid easy-to-guess combinations. Make sure to train employees on what constitutes a strong password and why it’s vital that theirs is secure.

Organizations can support security by implementing additional layers of protection, like two-factor authentication, as well as strong cryptography strategies that keep sensitive information safe. While no plan is 100% fool-proof, having a clearly defined strategy and team dedicated to protecting sensitive information is essential to maintaining customer and employee trust.

Thinking ahead to the post-COVID future

Any discussion of employee and customer experience today must take the impact of COVID-19 into account. With widespread distribution of vaccines on the horizon for 2021, however, it’s also important to think ahead to how today’s investments will play out after the pandemic. While ID proofing, SSO and instant card issuance offer sanitary benefits that are especially valuable during COVID-19, they also streamline customer and employee experiences in ways that will continue to improve ROI after the pandemic is just a memory.