Among the world's leading financial institutions, Bank of America is committing to FIDO standards for strong authentication, along with other leaders in the financial sector, including Discover Financial Services, MasterCard and Goldman Sachs.

"Providing our customers with a convenient, secure digital banking experience is a top priority for us," said Dave Godsman, Bank of America Digital Banking Solutions & Operations Executive. "As the world rapidly changes, our involvement in the FIDO Alliance will help ensure we continue to provide the convenient and secure solutions our customers want."

"Bank of America is counted among the world's leaders in financial services. As an institution responsible to secure high-value interests and relationships across consumer, government, enterprise, and business, Bank of America is among a select few 'Relying Parties' ideally positioned to drive adoption of FIDO standards at Internet scale," said Michael Barrett, president of the FIDO Alliance. "We welcome Bank of America to our Board of Directors at a pivotal point in FIDO Alliance history. With our review draft specifications just publicly released, and the marketplace poised to deploy 'FIDO Ready' certified solutions in 2014, both users and those who serve them are eager to embrace simpler, stronger FIDO authentication."

"Historically, strong two factor hardware authentication has been too costly and complicated to scale for mass markets," said Stina Ehrensvard, CEO and founder of Yubico. "We are pleased to see an ever-increasing number of large online services and financial institutions joining the FIDO Alliance and addressing the issues. FIDO certified devices offer better security and a greatly improved user experience over traditional software-and-hardware based authentication technologies."

FIDO Alliance members commit to share technology and collaborate to deliver open specifications for universal strong authentication that enables FIDO-compliant authentication methods to be interoperable, more secure and private, and easier-to-use.

FIDO specifications will support a full range of authentication technologies, including biometrics such as fingerprint and iris scanners, voice and facial recognition, as well as further enabling existing solutions and communications standards, such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), USB Security Tokens, embedded Secure Elements (eSE), Smart Cards, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Near Field Communication (NFC). The open specifications are being designed to be extensible and to accommodate future innovation, as well as protect existing investments. FIDO specifications allow the interaction of technologies within an interoperable infrastructure, enabling authentication choice to meet the distinct needs of users and organizations.