Biometrics: Ensuring Resilience in the Face of Spoofing

In today's fintech world, information security is the new arms race. We all know passwords are not really working and dedicated tokens are cumbersome and expensive. Biometric technology is the way forward, but so too is ensuring anti-spoofing measures are there to combat fraud and false impersonation.

Liveness detection is increasingly playing a significant role in the digital identity process. Remote on-boarding has it's challenges for many companies and can be a long winded process for new customers that usually involves lots of paperwork or trips to the local branch to prove you are real and you hold a genuine passport, driving licence or ID card. Know your customer (KYC) is a crucial element and solving the digital on-boarding issue is a priority for everyone.

Proving... you are, who you say you are, and in real-time... is one of today's greatest digital identity challenges for banks and other financial services providers to have complete identity assurance and a resilience to impersonation or spoofing.

Many businesses are investing in biometric technology to transform their customer experiences while hackers look to exploit that same technology to commit fraud.

Daon has produced a white paper on how to leverage Daon’s IdentityX® authentication platform which gives businesses the foundation on which to build their anti-spoofing strategies. If you would like to receive a copy, please contact me here.

Daon is a global leader in biometric authentication, identity assurance and digital on-boarding. Daon has gained 17 years in the biometrics industry, with a wealth of knowledge, experience and a reputation for being a trusted technology partner. Daon's world reknown IdentityX® platform is being used by many global brands, including MasterCard, USAA and Atom Bank, to name just a few.

Daon's platform combines biometrics such as face, voice and fingerprint together with PIN/Passcode and device binding. This also meets two-factor authentication compliance as set out in the Strong Customer Authentication guidelines within the updated EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2) regulations. Biometrics are being used to improve the customer experience regarding log-ins and verifying transactions, and to smooth the customer journey as an alternative to passwords or password re-sets.

Today's global biometrics market is growing at a rapid rate. Annual revenue from biometrics embedded in mobile devices, biometric app downloads, and biometric transactions authentication are projected to grow from $6.5 billion in 2016 to $50.6 billion in 2022 reflecting a CAGR of nearly 41% with total forecast period revenues exceeding $193 billion.

More than 1.9 billion biometrically enabled mobile devices will be in circulation by the end of 2017. This will grow to an unprecedented 5.5 billion devices by 2022 as this massive, globally available platform remains the driving force behind worldwide biometric adoption. By 2020, biometrics will be standard on 100% of the nearly 2.4 billion mobile devices sold each year.

By 2022, 98% of all mobile devices will be biometrically enabled generating 16.7 billion biometric app downloads and more than 1.37 trillion payment and non-payment mobile devices transactions that require some level of biometric authentication. (Statistics courtesy of Acuity Market Intelligence).

With both Apple's new iPhone X (10) and it's Face ID, as well as Samsung's forth-coming Galaxy S9 rumoured to have depth-sensing facial recognition, biometrics is certainly coming of age in the mobile sector!

There is no doubt, biometrics is changing people's habits in almost every aspect of their daily lives; from mobile banking and payments, to travel, automation and home security.