For the first time, you can now give your biometrics to OpenAI to do nothing more than you already can. This is just a pure cult of personality.
Proving authenticity in an increasingly diasporic society is difficult.
We should seek to either reduce or embrace entropy in the design of our systems. You either want systems which prove there are no Sybil attacks, or you manufacture halls of mirrors.
This is a continuous battle, there’s no panacea here, even the eye scan has threat vectors.
Calling KYC a solved problem is ludicrous.
Banks tend not to over engineer things. KYC can be seen as a 3 sided trade off: cost of KYC infra/process/etc, lost revenue from denied business and fines from regulators.
They (the banks) don’t really care about the social goals of KYC, they just try to best optimize for expected value in the trade offs.
The regulators understand this, and are basically fine with it. They have their own trade offs they are balancing.
Both sides mostly find and equilibrium.
One of the more important goals isn't to directly stop fraud but instead to provide tools that give end users results that scale with the amount of effort invested. The level of risk should be a tradeoff that the end user is able to make.
Current solutions mostly allow for that but certainly have some rough edges.
it appears to not really do much at all
A reminder: neither the Visa nor Mastercard payment networks have any ability to match, or authenticate, cardholder name.
We pretend that they do and we're used to merchants and operators (and web forms) insisting on exact matches of cardholder name ... but it's all a fiction.
As long as you get the digits - and the supporting number/zip portions - correct, the transaction will run with "Mickey Mouse" ... or even "A B" (initials).
This is in contrast to AMEX whose network does have cardholder name verification.