“Which people are real and which are synthetic?” sounds like a question from Blade Runner, but for banks, the issue is far from science fiction.
In the 1982 sci-fi movie Blade Runner, Deckard, a hard-bitten ex-detective played by Harrison Ford, had to track down replicants — robots who were so lifelike that it was almost impossible to tell man from machine. In the coming years, bankers will need the equivalent of Deckards on their staffs as they deal with one of the most serious problems facing the financial community: synthetic identity fraud.