Authentication

When the San Bernardino shooter obtained a loan online, he reportedly used his real name, which wasn't on the government's sanctions-screening list, underscoring the limitations of identity verification technology.

The Wells Fargo scandal is an example of what happens when a system requires you to effectively hand over the keys to your identity to strangers as if you were giving them your car keys. Moreover, it is a call to banks to restore trust and become leaders in fixing the ID problem once and for all.

Combining biometrics with device ID, social data, behavior patterns and other factors builds a strong foundation for artificial intelligence to conduct identity proofing and transaction authorization.

Biometric security company Hypr Corp. has closed a $3 million funding round to accelerate the development and adoption of its encryption product.

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of House lawmakers on the financial services panel introduced legislation Wednesday that would help banks remotely open accounts.

Our FinTech Forward Companies to Watch are helping banks step up their game by offering virtual assistance, better money management tools and other solutions.

It's hard to sell a big bank something regardless of the tech company's size. But for early-stage startups with only a handful of employees and a product still under development, the challenge is far greater than for seasoned tech vendors.

Banks continue to gather ID documents manually from would-be customers, even ones who sought to open accounts online. Bringing the manual process into the digital age is the goal of several startups.

The federal government recently began to discourage companies from using SMS-based authentication in their two-factor authentication schemes. So do banks need to completely eliminate authentication via text message? Not entirely.

Banks have gotten better at detecting digital banking fraud, but the process of closing and reopening accounts is still a mess — and that is what could send more customers packing.

In the wake of the Bitfinex heist, protecting consumers must again be at the forefront of the digital currency community.

Most would agree the way digital identity is managed is suboptimal. But how identity should be managed, and who should manage it, are shaping up to be hotly debated questions.

Banks will likely take a wait-and-see approach before connecting their apps to Siri, Apple's talking digital assistant. Such conservatism poses risks as consumers increasingly demand the latest digital features.

Many financial criminals are switching to a more sophisticated kind of identity theft in which they open accounts based on stolen identities, or on composites of information stolen from different people.

The Electronic Payments Coalition's arguments supporting Visa in its legal battle with Walmart are not based in fact.

Some days the ride-sharing app receives more than a million phishing emails — a stat to which large banks can relate. But after deploying common protocols and open-source software, Uber now rejects most bad emails.

The drumbeat of news about hackers stealing millions of dollars by gaming the Swift interbank messaging system should have been a wake-up call for banking executives, but it's unclear how many of them answered it. Is it too late for them to shore up their defenses?

By allowing commercial clients to authenticate via an eye scan, Wells Fargo is making a burdensome task simple. Secil Watson, head of wholesale Internet solutions, is pushing the bank to make digital banking easier for commercial clients.

In the ongoing melee between the two major players, strong authentication has been put on the backburner in favor of the respective economies of implementing chip card technology.

The San Francisco bank isn't interested in making splashy investments in technology. At an investor day event Tuesday, Wells executives said they would focus on taking incremental steps to reduce costs and improve customer experiences.