Chinese banks will study the faces of borrowers to see if they will pay

China and facial recognition are already hard to break. The Asian country is characterized by the fact that does not attach much importance to the privacy of its citizens, what we see with the use that it gives cameras mobile phones and smart TVs.

Facial recognition is already immersed in many sectors of Chinese society, although it seems that there is always a very important one. "It is never too late if happiness is good", will we think of the Chinese banks that began to study the faces of borrowers to know if they can trust them .

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Chinese banks have also wanted to take advantage of facial recognition in recent weeks. According to Financial Times reports, the country's banks are already using a technology that specializes in badyzing the facial movements of customers who will ask for loans to find out if they will pay in the future .

The goal is obviously to: Recognize if the client is telling the truth when he explains why he is applying for a loan at the bank. Officials do not want fraud of any kind and to avoid them will have as allies the cameras of smartphones .

Here comes into play Ping An, the conglomerate of financial services that wanted to put an end to lies technology. It is the group in charge of the development of the technological system which badyzes the facial micromovements of the borrowers in order to evaluate their reliability .

The use of this technology will allow to see all the customers' nervous tics and to know if they are lying or telling the truth . The system created by Ping An is able to badyze up to 54 movements of the face, all brief and involuntary.

Our body tends to make expressions unconsciously before the brain can control the movements of the face . These expressions reveal more information than we would like, such as a wink or moving in a little more than a second of the eyes forward or backward.

New step in the debate on facial recognition

This is not it's the first time that a financial group is studying the implementation of facial recognition to study the customers. This has already happened with some Western financial conglomerates who rejected this option for not having complete confidence in the reliability of the technology and in the ethics of its use.

Reliability does not seem to be a problem for this technology. Ping An, since would have an accuracy of 99.8%, which would imply a very significant reduction in the economic losses of Chinese banks. Lee Yuansiong, one of the leaders of the company, confirmed this statement:

We use micro-expression recognition technology to review loan applications. This captures subtle changes in customer facial expressions that help identify and prevent the risk of fraud. We reduced credit losses by 60% with this technology. It is more accurate than other methods of detecting fraud.

As explained by those already working with this system, the expression recognition technology is not the only factor involved in deciding whether to grant a loan to the plaintiff or no. However, if this technology detects something odd, a thorough investigation is opened to review the client's case.

This technology not only allows the bank to reduce the number of scams that it undergoes, but also to implement its lending service. in other areas where it is not located . This is how remote loans could happen, which banks could grant by observing the faces of customers through the cameras developed by Ping An.

The arrival of remote loans is a great benefit for many banks that do not have as much power as the conglomerate Ping An. Thanks to this feature, other Chinese banks are already working with the technological system badysis of micro-expressions.

As always happens when we talk about facial recognition and China, and expert voices against this system have already been mentioned . We are talking here about Husayn Kbadai, co-founder of the company specializing in facial recognition Onfido, who pointed out that this technology has not always produced consistent results.

"Also, even if reliability is demonstrated by research, there are serious ethical problems around this use case" explains Kbadai, who explains that this system must be used without the consent of the user to capture natural micro-expressions, with all of this entails.

Despite the debate that may create the latest measure of Chinese banks to avoid scams, it seems that these entities will have no problem to continue using technology. Once again, the privacy of Chinese citizens is set aside without receiving the importance it deserves.