The authorities allowed the refusal to attract banks to the state system of delivery of biometrics – RBC

The authorities are leaning towards the option in which only Rostelecom, the Central Bank and the government will become participants in the joint venture for the development of the Unified Biometric System. Earlier, the project partners announced the largest banks

The fact that the last of the discussed options for the further development of the Unified Biometric System (UBS) is the creation of a joint venture with the participation of Rostelecom, the government and the Bank of Russia, RBC was told by an interlocutor close to its potential participants, and also two sources in banks. According to one of the interlocutors, the decision on this composition has been made, the formation of the joint venture may be completed by the summer. The second interlocutor clarified that a native of the Federal Tax Service (FTS) may become the head of the new company, but did not specify who exactly. ,>

As the representative of the office of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, who is in charge of the project, told RBC, the creation of the joint venture “is at the stage of development.” “There are plans to launch the enterprise in about six months. It is too early to comment on the decision on the parameters of the joint venture, as well as on the details of its functioning, ”he said.

A Rostelecom spokesman declined to comment. The representative of the Central Bank did not answer RBC’s questions. RBC sent a request to the Federal Tax Service.

The EBS was created in 2018 at the initiative of the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Russia. The system operator is Rostelecom. To use the system, the user must submit biometrics samples (face casts and voice recordings) at certain bank branches and register on the public services portal. From this year, the regions can launch the possibility of collecting biometrics at the MFC.

With the help of the EBS, you can receive banking services, an electronic signature in certification centers, purchase electronic SIM cards (eSIM), last year the system was tested for certification in Russian universities, identification for participation in court hearings may be launched in the near future. At the end of December, the EBS received the status of a state information system.

Last November, at the Artificial Intelligence conference on artificial intelligence, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that biometric data should be stored in a single and secure state information system. “The state should take responsibility for its storage and at the same time provide free access to it for banks and other organizations, but in a fully encrypted form, excluding any external interference, open access to a person’s personal data,” he said.

According to the Central Bank, over 236 thousand users are currently registered in the system. 217 banks are connected to it, biometric data can be submitted in 13 thousand bank branches.

Back in the spring of last year, RBC’s sources in the telecommunications market said that for the development of the EBS, the option of creating a joint venture with the participation of Rostelecom and Sberbank was being discussed. As the head of Sberbank German Gref said in an interview with RBC, it was assumed that in the new company – Digital Identification Technologies – Sberbank and Rostelecom could receive 49% each, and the remaining 2% – the government. The model assumed that the business would pay the JV at a certain rate for each use of the biometric sample. In the future, the possibility of expanding the number of participants was not ruled out. As predicted by the president of Rostelecom Mikhail Oseevsky, the creation of such a joint venture could “in a fairly short time” increase the base of the EBS to 30-40 million casts.

Later, other major banks were also named participants in the joint venture, including VTB, Gazprombank, Alfa-Bank, Rosselkhozbank, Promsvyazbank, Tinkoff-Bank and Pochta-Bank. But as Kommersant reported, this option did not suit Sberbank.

According to a source of RBC in the banking market, no one named the reasons for the refusal of banks to participate in the project to credit institutions. “The Ministry of Digital Industry and Rostelecom simply stopped inviting credit organizations to discuss the project,” he said. At the same time, two interlocutors of RBC linked the new composition of the JV participants with the fact that the Federal Security Service (FSB) had questions about the previous JV formats.

VTB will act in accordance with the directions for the development of the biometric system approved by the government and the Bank of Russia, a bank representative told RBC. Representatives of other large credit institutions did not provide official responses to RBC’s inquiries.

Egor Krivosheya, head of research at the Skolkovo-NES center, believes that the participation of large government agencies and Rostelecom in the development of the system is “a fairly understandable step,” while “the appearance of banks in the project could send a wrong signal that the EBS is used only for financial services, although this system can be applied much more broadly. ” The second reason for the banks’ abandonment of the project, in his opinion, is that the banks themselves have their own biometric identification systems, and participation in this project could force them to disclose information about their biometric technologies, which they would not like to share.

“Problems with the spread of the EBS are rooted in three reasons. First, there is a low level of confidence of some consumer groups in the new technology and a low level of digital literacy, so they are not ready to hand over their biometric data. Secondly, the lack of the necessary infrastructure. Now cameras for face identification are already used everywhere, but equipment for identification by other factors (for example, palms) is not so widespread. Third, the imperfection of the digital regulatory field. It is actively developing, but questions remain: for example, the status of the digital profile is not clear: can it be equated with other methods of identification or not, “Krivosheya lists.

At the same time, biometrics samples collected by banks can get into the EBS, even if they do not participate in the creation of the joint venture. At the end of last year, the chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, said that a mechanism for transferring biometric data of bank customers to the EBS will be developed by the fall of 2022.