Page 61 - Pay Magazine s2014

volume 9 • fall 2016
to all customers—they record
their voices to keep on le with
the bank in order to verify identity —after rst o ering the technology through its wealth management arm in 2013. A survey found that 93 percent of those customers “rated the technology at least 9
of 10 for speed, ease of use and security,” the bank said.
Major payments and retail players —including Amazon, Google, Visa, PayPal and Mastercard—are de- voting signi cant money and re- search e ort to gaining the biomet- ric edge. Consumers worldwide will download more than 770 million biometric authentication applica- tions annually by 2019, up from
6 million in 2015, according to Juniper Research. Sales of just one biometric technology—facial recognition software—will top $8.2 billion in 2020, up from $2.8 billion in 2015, according to market research rm Markets- andMarkets.
One potential challenge for ex- panding the use of biometrics in payments and retail transactions is globalization. In March, biometrics seemed to win a PR boost when
online marketplace eBay joined the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance, a group formed in 2012 that pro- motes the use of biometrics by consumers to prove their identity in e-commerce transactions and other online tasks.
EBay did not immediately detail what its FIDO membership might mean for its own authentication e orts except to say that it “hopes to further the adoption
of this technology and welcomes contributors from across the alliance to help build the com- munity.” FIDO says products it has certi ed have seen “early deployments” via such companies as PayPal, Samsung, Alipay and Google. A consumer could use
a FIDO-certi ed technology to, for instance, authenticate herself via digital representations of
her ngerprints.
Still, the move carried importance, as it helps lay a foundation for future biometric standards that could help spread such technolo- gies. “Speci cations such as [those from] FIDO are becoming widely adopted because they set the scene for decentralized on-device biometrics and server-side valida- tion of access, rather than stock- piling biometrics at enterprises
or simply unlocking an application,” says George Avetisov, CEO of HYPR Corp., a biometric security platform. “Many of our partners are looking for a product that de- centralizes the storage of biometric data while enabling biometric auth- entication in a fully interoperable
manner. We predict that such open standards and speci cations may become federal regulations on biometric data storage at some point.”
For now, though, somewhat of
a frontier mentality holds in bio- metric payments and transactions —which also presents an opportu- nity for payments providers and other industry players. “There aren’t many answers now, but these questions will be asked and addressed through regulation and legislation, just not soon enough,” writes Ben Knie , a senior analyst at Aite Group. “Financial institu- tions have an opportunity to in uence these decisions and demonstrate responsible and secure practices.”
But, he adds, biometrics do in- deed point toward a more secure payment and transaction future. “It is counterintuitive, but a bio- metric signature is actually more anonymous than what we typically consider [personally identi able information] such as name, ad- dress, date of birth and tax ID,” Knei says. “Even if one were to include the types of information used in knowledge-based auth- entication—such as mother’s maiden name, past addresses
or past cars owned—this infor- mation is still much easier to use, for good or bad, than a biometric signature. The biometric signature is a mathematical representation of physical attributes that are encrypted and can be matched
to future example cases.”
paybefore.com 59