BC Protege+, a tool to prevent fraudulent account openings, received at least 7,800 activations | finance

The idea is to prevent fraudulent accounts from being opened, using a fake identity, for example. The tool will also allow a company or citizen to prevent people from being listed as account holders or representatives.

The service began operating this morning at 10 am. Since then, 7,800 people have activated protection and there have been 500,000 inquiries from financial institutions. Of this number of inquiries, 263 inquiries were returned without any interest in opening accounts.

“(Today’s number) shows the beginning of a system that is proving to be real and is already working its way through citizens’ communication with financial institutions,” Correa said.

On average, 10 million relationships are opened with the financial system every month, said Carlos Eduardo Gomez, head of BC’s corporate services department. According to him, the number of consultations should grow “rapidly” with the deployment of the tool.

“Our goal is to give citizens another protection tool. This protection tool goes beyond the issue of scams and fraud, because you will also prevent those spam accounts or those potential operations where you are not very transparent and you end up in a relationship with the financial institution,” Gomez said.

To activate protection, you must visit the website of the Central Bank of the My BC region and log in with a gov.br account or a gold level account with 2-step verification enabled. In this environment, it will be possible to know whether a citizen wishes to open new accounts or not at any time.

This option will be registered in the database that institutions must consult before opening an account. If it is blocked, the institution will not be able to open the account and must notify the citizen to activate the protection.

The Bank of Colombia expects a decrease in fraud and identity fraud when opening accounts, as well as a decrease in the opening of accounts with CPFs and CNPJs for uninterested people and companies, reducing losses for people and companies and enhancing the integrity of the financial system, Correa said.

“(We hope for) greater security also for those who have already been victims of data leaks,” the director said.

In response to a question about the development of the system, and how to cover the possibility of preventing the creation of Pix keys, the head of the enterprise service department said that if the community accepts the tool, BC will move to other products.

Gomez, from British Columbia, highlighted that there are discussions regarding Pix keys, credit operations and credit cards, for example, and that it will be necessary to discuss the most relevant product protections and analyze the level of complexity for each.

“(We will follow the development) and we will discuss the next products. Chavis Peaks, I can tell you, we have the biggest claim to do this,” he said.