Biometrics

If you’ve got a smartphone, most likely you can unlock it with a passcode, fingerprint, or facial scan. While facial scans are the current state of the art for authentication, they are not enough. Soon your voice and the rest of your fingers will be involved, too. Why does that matter?

Authentication is used for a lot more than unlocking your phone. Once you’re at your home screen, your fingerprint or facial scan grants access to mobile payment apps, banking apps, and all manner of ways to spend and move money. To better protect these transactions from fraud, your voice, how you hold, tap, and swipe your device, and other physical characteristics such as your gait can now authenticate that it’s really you who’s using your phone — not a cybercriminal who’s figured a way to hijack your number or intercept text messages (or just someone who’s gotten their hands on your phone and correctly guessed the passcode).

These new authentication methods are based on inherence, or “something you are,” and provide an immutable cornerstone to identity authentication that older methods, such as device recognition, no longer can. To learn how your bank can best protect payments and transactions with the most modern authentication methods available, read on.