Biometrics

The advent of Faster Payments services plus Europe’s PSD2 have heightened concerns among banks about increased fraud risks. This has created opportunities for firms such as New York/Israel’s BioCatch and San Francisco’s BehavioSec, both of which develop technology around behavioral biometrics analysis.

Despite recent scrutiny of mobile point of sale devices, the mobile payments category as a whole has generally carried a promise of initiating a safer transaction through the use of biometrics, device ID, geolocation and other factors.

To date, payments companies have feared common biometric methods such as fingerprint or iris scanning are unreliable and susceptible to hacking. However, there’s growing evidence that finger vein ID could prove more palatable.

"Banks should be investing in innovation in this area or risk getting left behind," a fintech CEO warns.

U.S. Bank is firmly committed to voice assistant technology, but remains cautious about enabling all forms of money movement via verbal commands.

Seeking to bolster digital identity and transaction security at the world's largest banks, OneSpan is partnering with Nok Nok Labs to provide authentication for mobile and online accounts, favoring biometrics or other technologies over static passwords.

Once companies can recognize their customers without constantly asking security questions, they can shower them with benefits to enhance the shopping experience while bolstering their brand, writes Robert Capps, vice president at NuData Security, a Mastercard company.

The Dixons Carphone hack shows again that merchants and payment companies need to do more to make data unattractive to thieves, according to Robert Capps, vice president of NuData Security, a Mastercard Company.

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The move is part of a larger trend to provide enterprise customers with tech capabilities available to retail customers.