Finding better authentication is one of the biggest challenges still lying ahead for mobile banking, Ben Knieff, fraud product marketing director at NICE Actimize, tells Bank Innovation. NICE Actimize provides financial crime, risk and compliance solutions. “User name and passcode isn’t enough,” he says, suggesting that security precaution answers may lie with using consumers’ smartphones’ GPS, voice biometrics or even iris recognition as techniques required to allow consumers to assess their finances.

“There are a lot of questions and not a lot of answers,” says Knieff. “As an industry, we need solutions for remote banking.”

That is especially true because he believes consumers’ expectations of “anytime, anyplace” for everything they do in their lives, including their financial duties, won’t end. However, FIs still have yet to offer their customers this level of service.

“Banks aren’t doing that today,” Knieff says. “Banks say they love mobile, but won’t [always] let customers move money because it’s risky.”

Knieff, however, doesn’t view mobile as any riskier — or different — than internet banking and believes banks must offer crucial mobile functionality to customers; namely, expedite bill bay and P2P payments.

Looking beyond mobile, Knieff alerted us that NICE Actimize will unveil a “big new release” related to risk toward the year’s end. Though the new product has no official name yet, Knieff says he’s been referring to the solution as “decision analytics,” and it aims to help FIs respond to various levels of risk. Though banks have been very good at identifying transactions’ risk levels “for ages,” Knieff explains they still require refinements on dealing with the risk levels. The to-be-launched service hopes to solve this quandary.

Decision analytics, explains Knieff, will take into account customer information such as what channel consumers are interacting on, as well as assess how valuable customers are to help FIs know how to properly handle the risk. For high-risk transactions, the solution would help banks reach out to a consumer in a way that’s “appropriate” to the risk level and his communication preference, Knieff explains.

“It’s layering technology to take the data and connect fraud into intelligent decisions,” Knieff tells Bank Innovation. He says the technology is already up and running at one institution on a limited basis.