Financial service organizations that want to reap the benefits of the digital revolution to improve security, reduce friction, lower costs, and attract the most desirable customers, will adopt biometric authentication in the Cloud as the foundation for enhancing and securing the customer journey.
Biometrics are a global phenomenon that financial service players ignore at their peril. Acuity forecasts that by 2022, 5.6 billion biometric mobile devices will secure 1.37 trillion biometrically-enabled payment and non-payment transactions. On-device biometrics may improve the user authentication experience, but the big financial service payoff will come from Cloud-biometrics that also provide secure, reliable identity assurance.
Pushing biometrics to “the edge” of the financial service ecosystem, e.g. smartphones, simplifies authentication and reduces friction, but on-device biometrics can only link a user to a specific device,. Cloud-based, or server-side, biometrics simplify authentication and reduce friction while linking an individual to a Unique Verifiable Identity (UVI) that is device and platform independent, and provides a non-revocable user, not device-based, audit trail for each transaction.
Concerns about Cloud biometric data being vulnerable to theft and misuse have been sensationalized. Best practice approaches to deploy solutions purpose-built to secure biometrics, address data storage and management concerns. This includes anonymous storage, disaggregating biometrics from other Personally Identifiable Information (PII) – including templates from multiple biometric modalities – and installing anti-spoofing and presentation attack countermeasures.
Biometrics in the Cloud support continuous authentication via behavioral biometrics, and enable multifactor ’escalation,’ or step-up capabilities, that introduce biometric challenge and response protocols based on dynamic risk assessments. Cloud biometrics should therefore be viewed as more than just a means to enhance the customer journey, but as a path to creating an intelligent, identity-centric platform that addresses authentication risk across the entire financial service enterprise.
Acuity makes the case for Cloud biometrics in our latest whitepaper Taming the Authentication Beast: Simplifying and Enhancing the Customer Journey with Biometrics in the Cloud.” Download the whitepaper at www.acuity-mi.com/CloudFS.php.