“This is one of the fastest-growing user adoptions we have seen globally.” -Tom Grissen, CEO, Daon

Daon has a big new client in Turkey, with Akbank leveraging its IdentityX solution to become the first bank in the country to enable customer authentication via facial recognition.

In announcing the deployment, the companies noted that Brand Finance named Akbank “The Most Valuable Banking Brand in Turkey” for the seventh year in a row in 2017. And in following through with the deployment, the bank has so far lived up to the hype, building an IdentityX-powered app that saw almost 250,000 end users opt into “almost immediately,” in the words of Daon CEO Tom Grissen.

“This is one of the fastest-growing user adoptions we have seen globally,” Grissen said, adding, “We attribute this to Akbank’s attention to first-class innovation, user experience and communication, combined with the appeal of IdentityX.”

It’s another testament to the popularity of Daon’s mobile-based biometric authentication platform, which also supports fingerprint- and voice-based authentication, in addition to facial recognition. Just last week, Daon announced that South Africa’s Capitec Bank had signed on for a multi-year partnership revolving around IdentityX; and while the platform has proven particularly appealing for customer authentication in the financial services sector, it also took a big step into civil ID earlier this year through a partnership with the New Zealand government.

As for Akbank, the deployment was undertaken in collaboration with NTT Data, and Daon’s announcement suggested that IdentityX’s role could get bigger moving forward, asserting that Akbank “is committed to expanding the role of biometrics throughout its customers’ journeys and touch points with Daon’s IdentityX at the heart of the omni-channel platform.”

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)