Every month, the payment of pension checks to public retirees, one of Banco Supervielle’s most important customer segments, was a complex and tedious process because the recipients had to endure an extensive authentication process with various documents and certificates. With the deployment of Lumidigm’s multispectral imaging biometric authentication sensors at over 175 banks, pensioners now need only present a finger to prove that they are who they say they are in order to receive their monthly stipend quickly and easily.

Banco Supervielle has already received an award for this pensioner biometric identification project from the FELABAN CLAB 2013 Congress. The conference was organized by the Latin American Federation of Banks (FELABAN), the Latin American Bankers Committee (CLAB) and the Florida International Bankers Association (FIBA).

This had been a sensitive problem. In order to prevent fraudulent receipt of pension funds that were being erroneously issued to persons that have since deceased, retirees were required to submit to a cumbersome authentication process with documents and certificates. A solution that reduced this burden had to be easy and secure and had to streamline the process for about one million pensioners every month. Multispectral technology, with its capability of reading fingerprints of older people on the first try, replaced the previous tedious and slow process with one that is fast and fair to the senior citizen.

“We enrolled 7,900 retirees per day and had 800,000 enrolled by the end of 2013,” says Claudio Ercolessi, CIO of Banco Supervielle. “The enrollment phase went faster than what we expected, mainly because the performance and accuracy of multispectral technology lets us get very good enrollment data very quickly.”

The bank’s investment in biometric kiosks has already resulted in considerable savings due to fraud reduction. In addition, 170 cashiers were retrained as commercial advisors, allowing the bank to increase the level of attention to the bank’s customers.

“Customer satisfaction is the cornerstone of our banking business,” says Ercolessi. “The new biometric kiosks allow us to provide better service to all of our customers in a secure and convenient manner. The pensioners are delighted!”