Industry on edge as Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath flags deepfake concerns
Nithin Kamath, chief executive officer of one of India’s largest stockbrokers, Zerodha, last week posted a deepfake video of himself to highlight the potential impact of such technology in the financial services world.
“As the deepfakes improve, I think it will only become harder over time to validate if the person on the other side (of a video) is real or AI-generated. This problem will be bigger for banks that have more stringent regulatory requirements during onboarding,” wrote Kamath on microblogging site X (previously Twitter).
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteNorthwestern UniversityKellogg Post Graduate Certificate in Product ManagementVisitIIT DelhiIITD Certificate Programme in Data Science & Machine LearningVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Digital TransformationVisitThis led to conversations picking up across the sector around how identity verification, a key element in the financial services sector, can be affected by deepfakes.
A few years ago, looking at the need for digital onboarding of customers, financial services regulators introduced video KYC. This enables customers to use their Aadhaar for identity verification and a video to conclusively validate the process. Allowing digital onboarding helped reduce the cost of KYC operations drastically — from somewhere around Rs 150 to Rs 200 for each customer to be physically validated to only a few rupees.
No wonder, therefore, the industry adopted this practice wholeheartedly.
But now the question is what happens if the customer uses a deepfake video to game the KYC system?
Also read | Deepfake has emerged as a new threat, new regulation soon to tackle it: Ashwini Vaishnaw
Checks in place
“The Reserve
