Biometrics

Visa, Mountain America Credit Union and Fingerprints AB were thrilled with their biometric card test, but also faced the grim realization that real world infrastructure may not be as accommodating.

The Face Login will enable users of the Paytm payment platform to log into the app simply by looking into their phones, a move designed to add a biometric layer to prevent phishing attacks.

Digital ID platform developers are competing to sign up partners to deploy their technologies to replace vulnerable usernames and passwords with a single sign-in. The challenge is to sign up a sufficient volume of partners to make these platforms attractive for consumers and businesses.

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.

Banks, technology developers and payment companies are all experimenting with new ways to identify consumers by their unique physical traits, with the ultimate goal of improving security while also streamlining customer onboarding and authentication.

In the ongoing quest to replace PINs and passwords, Mastercard has introduced a kit enabling consumers to register their own fingerprint on a biometric card at home, bypassing the need to visit a bank.

Consumers enrolled in Denmark’s Dankort domestic payments scheme may sign up to make payments using only their finger in a pilot that the payments firm Nets is conducting in Copenhagen.

A few handshakes among a small group of Silicon Valley techies are presenting the best chance yet to wipe out passwords in favor of modern identity protection.

Gemalto is working with Lebanon-based areeba to test a biometric contactless Visa EMV card in the Middle East that uses a fingerprint to authorize transactions.

In seeking to solidify that potential, FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium have created Web Authentication (WebAuthn), a new standard that allows approved FIDO Authentication methods to operate through browsers.

Options include multilayered security solutions that incorporate verification via passive biometrics, without adding friction, by evaluating a consumer’s inherent behavior online during the transaction process, writes NuData Security's Lisa Baergen.