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11/07/2026 1:55 pm
TL;DR: Banks are losing customers to slow or inefficient onboarding, with Fenergo reporting that 70% of financial institutions globally lost clients in the last year for that reason, while synthetic fraud and injection attacks are making gesture-heavy liveness checks less reliable according to Oz Forensics. The real issue is not active versus passive biometrics, but whether onboarding is risk-based enough to balance conversion with modern fraud resistance.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Oz Forensics: The Liveness Paradox in Digital Banking
By the numbers:
- 70% of financial institutions globally lost clients in the last year specifically due to slow or inefficient onboarding processes.
- 38% of customers abandon account creation simply because the process takes too long.
- nearly 68% of consumers have abandoned a financial application due to such technical friction.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should banks balance liveness security with onboarding conversion?
A: Banks should stop treating liveness as a universal challenge-and-response step and instead align verification strength to applicant risk.
Q: Why do gesture-based liveness checks fail against modern fraud?
A: They fail because the challenge itself is predictable and can be mirrored by deepfakes or satisfied by injected video streams.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about biometric onboarding?
A: Teams often assume biometric onboarding is a single control when it is really a chain of decisions.
Practitioner guidance
- Split onboarding by risk tier Define distinct identity proofing paths for low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk applicants so that every customer does not receive the same biometric burden.
- Add capture-path validation to biometric flows Check whether the video stream came from a physical camera sensor rather than a virtual camera or injected source.
- Measure abandonment alongside false accepts Track onboarding completion, abandonment rate, and challenge failure by device type, lighting condition, and country.
What's in the full article
Oz Forensics' full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The multi-frame liveness approach used to reduce friction while maintaining biometric assurance.
- The Injection Attack Detection logic that validates whether the stream came from a physical camera sensor.
- The reference to CEN/TS 18099 and the independent BixeLab testing context behind the detection claims.
- The practical distinction between active, passive, and orchestrated liveness in banking onboarding.
👉 Read Oz Forensics' analysis of the liveness paradox in digital banking →
Digital banking liveness: what is the governance gap for IAM teams?
Explore further
11/07/2026 2:05 pm
Legacy onboarding liveness creates a trust problem, not just a usability problem. Banks often talk about friction as if it were a customer experience issue alone, but every unnecessary step also changes fraud economics. When legitimate users abandon the flow, the institution loses revenue and the security team inherits a narrower, more failure-prone verification surface. The practitioner conclusion is that onboarding controls must be judged by both assurance value and conversion cost.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- Another finding from that report shows that only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, compared with nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable for risky onboarding flows?
A: Accountability should sit across identity, fraud, product, and risk leadership because onboarding affects trust, growth, and fraud loss at the same time. If one team owns only conversion and another owns only fraud, the organisation will optimise locally and fail globally. Shared governance is the only workable model.
👉 Read our full editorial: Liveness paradox in digital banking exposes onboarding risk
