> what I'm specifically addressing is "can we do it without the internet bit?",
Monzo could open some branches, where it's somebody else's problem to verify the identity of the staff in the building and you can be quite certain the person behind the desk is in fact an employee
Well tbh with you that's how I bank, and I agree with you.
I think that "app based" banking is a shitshow, and will only get
worse, and ultimately more insecure. The entire economic strategy of
dehumanisation is a catastrophe in the making.
And clearly there is no genuine market demand for it, people hate it
with a passion, but it's being forced on the population, probably for
other reasons more nefarious than "convenience" or "efficiency".
That said, if you're going to do telephone banking with another actual
human over an audio or AV channel - which is an acceptable mode of
interaction for me - then you may as well employ that information
stream for more sophisticated authentication as we go into the age of
AI deep-fake voices and video.
Because authentication doesn't need a terribly large bandwidth,
indeed we can do it with tiny amount, side-channels within the audio
stream see a good leverage point.
Do you think telephone-based banking is more secure than app-based banking? What's your argument for that?
My experience with talking to banks on the phone has been that common security measures seem laughable to me - like "last four digits of your SSN" laughable.
Good question. Yes I think it's more secure if complemented with other
good mechanisms. I agree that the current state of most voice based
schemes is pretty poor. But those that involve a separate codebook can
be quite tight.
Like all things it's more secure in the hands of people moderately
educated in protocols and sufficiently sceptical.
A general security problem, perhaps a paradox, is that the more we try
to hide it for "convenience", the more opaque and automatic, the more
people come to blindly depend on the mechanism at some other layer and
stop thinking.
I suppose what makes voice based interaction more secure is that it's
slower. It gives more time for levels of security in depth and for
people to figure out something is amiss.
But we'll have to see how that pans out with sophisticated
voice-spoofing technology because I expect most people, even well
educated and sceptical ones, are easily flipped into trust mode by the
sound of a seemingly familiar voice and some clever replay attacks.
Monzo could open some branches, where it's somebody else's problem to verify the identity of the staff in the building and you can be quite certain the person behind the desk is in fact an employee
(Edit: I know they're a 'challenger' bank)