Former Santander CTO Stakes Claim in FacePhi

Santander bank’s former Chief Technology Officer has taken a significant stake in Spain-based mobile biometrics specialist FacePhi, and has joined the company’s advisory board.

As Expansión reports, José Maria Fuster Van Bendegem has acquired 200,000 shares of the company – 100,000 from FacePhi founder and president Salvador Martí Varó and the other half from Juan Alfonso Ortiz Company. The acquisition gives Fuster a 1.5 percent holding in the company.

Fuster remains an external consultant to Santander, a bank that has shown enthusiastic support for new mobile FinTech in Spain by launching support for Apple Pay in the country months before bringing it to US customers.

For FacePhi, Fuster’s support should at the very least help to further raise its profile, and that of its Selphi platform, which is designed to use a standard smartphone’s camera to scan the face of an end user, enabling mobile-based biometric authentication. The platform has been targeted primarily at the banking sector, and recently attained FIDO UAF certification.