Top Trends for Biometrics in Financial Services

Biometrics is certainly a technology that is rapidly being adopted by the Financial Services industry and this is not just confined to mobile deployments. Mobile is a growing channel for the delivery of financial services and will start to dominate most financial sectors over the next five years but other channels are still a vital part of any delivery strategy.

This is an important message that I have learnt after spending the second half of 2015 researching how biometrics is becoming an important tool within the security toolbox that can be utilised in the fight against financial fraud and identity theft.

In a series of analyst reports that I authored in 2015 that were published in June, October and December 2015 by Goode Intelligence, I was able to carry out a deep-dive  into the adoption of biometric technology in financial services. This included banking, payment and mobile-based biometric services.

In the reports I identified five key trends that are currently shaping this market.

Bye Bye PINs for ATM Security

ATMs are unattended and when I type in my PIN I am always uber-aware of who is standing behind me in case they may be attempting to steal my PIN. Being a paranoid sort of person I go through a series of checks that includes checking for ATM skimmers or evidence that a camera may be pointing at the keyboard. Banks have installed awareness notices and stuck-on mirrors to help me protect my PIN but it shouldn't have to be like this. 

Things are changing and banks are modifying their ATM technology to phase out PINs and to embrace biometrics. There is also choice in the biometric deployment method; a bank can either integrate a biometric sensor into the ATM itself (fingerprint, palm-vein, finger-vein and Iris are being used) to go either cardless (my biometric replaces the plastic) or keep the card (the biometric is stored on the card and a biometric is captured at the ATM and then matched against the stored template on the card). There is also a mobile biometric solution that also replaces the need for a plastic bank card or integration of specialist sensors at the ATM; Hoyos Labs has a neat solution where the mobile device interacts with an ATM using a combination of barcode and mobile biometric authentication technology.  And if you like plastic cards then there are solutions as well; a number of vendors, including Zwipe, have integrated a fingerprint sensor into plastic cards to replace PINs. The plastic bank card will only work if the authorised user's fingerprint is first placed on the sensor. 

Authenticated Contactless Mobile Payments

One of the more visible success stories for biometric adoption in financial services has been the development of mobile biometric contactless payments. Apple Pay and Samsung Pay both use integrated fingerprint sensors to secure contactless mobile payments in physical locations. The PIN was adding friction to the physical payment experience so you can either forget about user authentication and limit the transaction amount (tap and pay for low value payments) or replace the PIN with a method that doesn't slow down the experience but still adds a level of security. 

How to tackle rising levels of Card-Not-Present Fraud?

Technology does reduce fraud. The deployment of EMV chip cards has led to a reduction of fraud at the physical point of sale. This has led criminals to move online and attack commerce channels that the EMV chip cannot protect. The rise of Card-Not-Present (CNP) fraud, especially for eCommerce transactions, and the movement towards mobile commerce has created the need for secure and convenient user authentication and transaction verification. Biometrics offers a viable solution. Expect to see the payment networks start to roll-out mobile-based biometric solutions that aims to tackle the CNP fraud problem and even support in 3D Secure 2.0. 

Wearable Payments to support Biometric Authentication 

It is early days for wearables; the market is too fragmented and there are too few devices currently being used by consumers. This will change and as more and more apps are developed to support the delivery of financial services to bands and smart watches then the need to validate identity and to protect commerce will become critical. For wearables, it is important to pick a biometric modality that suits the device and the application so expect to see technology such as heart-rate (ECG), behavioral and vascular being integrated into the next generation of wearable devices. Biometrics that can be captured when a device is close to the skin of its wearer. Brainwave for Glass perhaps?

Financial-Grade multi-modal biometric authentication to become de-facto for mobile banking apps

The final trend that I am pulling out of these reports is part of a movement to increase security of mobile-based biometric solutions without adversely effecting convenience and ensuring that financial services providers maintain ownership of identity. The industry needs to ensure that the biometric technology is hard to spoof, that the protocols cannot be compromised and that the vulnerabilities seen in existing 2FA solutions (including replay and man-in-the-middle attacks) are not introduced. And at the same time being easy to use, scalable and fit into existing identity lifecycle management tools (can I revoke a credential?). The use of more than one biometric modality, face and voice for instance, in a banking app can increase security and also provide choice for consumers. A service provider can also match the right biometric modality to the context of the login or transaction attempt; fingerprint may open the app but a challenge using another modality may be needed to send a payment to a new beneficiary. 

To conclude; both established financial services organisations, challenger banks and the emerging FinTech providers now understand the importance of choosing the most appropriate user authentication and transaction verification technology that can work across all finance channels and can meet the needs of convenience and security. Biometrics certainly ticks the boxes for convenience with millions of customers around the world paying for products and accessing mobile banking with the touch of the finger or by taking a selfie. A number of biometric platforms are also being introduced that also tick security, regulatory and privacy boxes including IEEE's Biometric Open Protocol Standard (BOPS). 

What is exceptional about this market is the sheer scale of deployment that has already taken place and the enormous potential that is yet to come. From millions of Brazilians daily withdrawing cash from biometrically-enabled ATMs, to mobile banking customers accessing their accounts with the touch of a finger or by taking an image of their face, the use of biometrics for financial services is improving security, reducing financial fraud and removing the need for cumbersome authentication solutions that are not fit for purpose in today's hyper-connected world.

Innovation in Biometrics Enables Alternative Payment Methods

Payments have been the major driving force for the wide-scale adoption of biometrics in the consumer market. Today, millions of customers (Goode Intelligence forecast 350 million plus during 2015) are using biometrics on a daily basis around the world to provide secure convenient user authentication and transaction authorisation and this theme is set to continue with a forecast of over three billion users by 2020. 

Biometrics for payments is increasingly a vital part of a payment service providers’ toolkit in the never-ending task of reducing financial fraud and ensuring that their customers can conveniently prove their identity and authorise transactions.

The adoption of biometrics for payments is also leading to wide-scale disruption in the payment industry, enabling alternative methods for consumers to pay for goods and services in a variety of payment scenarios. This is not simple replacing one authentication mechanism with another; the finger replacing the PIN. Biometrics is allowing alternative payment methods to be introduced, some of which are being supplied by non-traditional payment service providers. 

HYPR Corp has developed a biometric security protocol that provides digital payment platforms, including Bitcoin, with a solution to secure access to their digital payment assets.

One of the core security concerns around Bitcoin and other digital currency platforms is that unlike with credit cards, transactions are irreversible.

HYPR was founded to solve the core fraud problem by providing a definitive answer to the question of “Am I who I say I am?” 

HYPR answers the question of “Am I who I say I am?” through a three-factor authentication protocol that creates a biometric authentication bridge between the user and their mobile wallet. The cryptographic algorithm that HYPR uses is the same as the digital signature algorithm that the Bitcoin protocol uses. Because of this similarity, future iterations of the HYPR biometric security platform could be used to biometrically validate Bitcoin transactions.

Another company looking to secure Bitcoin transactions is Nymi with their heartbeat-enabled wearable band. The Nymi band can be used to store a users Bitcoin in a native biometric wallet with the private key tied to a unique ECG biometric signature. I recently demoed the capabilities of the Nymi band at a presentation I gave on the future of biometrics for wearables at the Biometrics 2015 conference in London. I even use the Nymi band to log me into my office computer and have been impressed at how natural it feels to allow me access to my computer. 

It is also enabling new ways in which consumers can use traditional payment methods, even cash (still the preferred payment type for many people). Hoyos Labs has developed a smartphone-based biometric authentication solution that aims to reduce the increasing amount of fraud at the ATM, negating the problem of bank card skimming. Their 1U ATM product is a software platform that allows bank customers to access their accounts via ATMs using biometrics on smartphones. There is no need for cards or for the customer to enter in a PIN at the ATM as the entire authentication occurs on the customer’s smartphone.

The Hoyos Labs solution is compatible with existing ATM platforms and does not need any hardware to be installed on the ATMs.

These are just three examples of how the latest biometric solutions are protecting payments and enabling alternative ways in which we can pay for a wide range of goods and services in a variety of payment scenarios; from Bitcoin to the humble bank note

I explore many more examples of biometric payments, including the rise of the mobile wallet, in an analyst report recently published by Goode Intelligence; "Biometrics for Payments; Payment Security Gets Personal". 

 

Biometrics for Banking Gets Going

I was talking with a senior manager responsible for authentication strategy at a leading retail bank recently about their views on biometrics for user authentication and whether they were thinking of adopting it. I remember a similar conversation with the same person in 2013 and remember them declaring that biometrics was simply not a possible solution for them; a combination of hardware and software OTP tokens was still the favoured solution. 

Moving forward two years and there has been quite a turn-around in their perception of biometrics for providing authentication to bank customers when accessing digital banking services. Biometrics is definitely on the agenda for them and they have a number of live and pilot projects that are leveraging biometrics on mobile devices including the support of Apple Touch ID for mobile app authentication. 

So what has changed in two years for them? 

I think the fundamental reason is the need for convenient privacy-aware authentication across a number of banking channels with the emergence of mobile as the prime banking channel (not forgetting the start of a wearable banking strategy). A hardware OTP token works well enough when a bank customer is accessing banking services from a desktop computer at home but simply does not cut it when that same customer is using their mobile phone or calling up their bank using a telephone-based service. These 1980s two-factor authentication technologies are also susceptible to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) and Phishing/Malware attacks.

This has led banking security professionals to look for alternatives that meet the needs to strongly authenticate across a wide range of existing banking channels. The explosion of FinTech-led financial services has also meant that challenger banks are looking at other innovative ways that customers can interact with their banks; biometric authentication gives them the potential to offer their customers a usable and secure method to protect their financial assets when accessing financial services from a range of endpoints.

The use of integrated fingerprint sensors is just one method of providing convenient banking user authentication and will continue to grow as more devices become available. However, I believe that the solutions will evolve and increasingly incorporate other authentication factors and biometric modalities to provide strong security and convenience. For instance, by combining face and voice in a multi-modal biometric authentication solution that can work across a range of banking channels. USAA's recent deployment of Daon's IdentityX multi-modal mobile authentication platform is a great example of this. 

Depending on the context of the transaction/interaction then you can either use a single modality - voice in an IVR interaction - or a combination of modalities - face and voice for mobile or desktop banking services. The combination of context and security risk will dictate the most-appropriate modality or factor to use.

There has also been a lot of debate as to the choice of biometric architecture that a bank should adopt; device-centric, where the biometric data never leaves the device, or server-centric, where the user enrols their biometric and then is stored by the financial institution. For verification; the matching is performed on the device for the device-centric model and against a stored template within a network database (Cloud) for the server-centric model. I think that both models have their merits. I believe that the decision to adopt one over the other (and there will be scenarios where a mixture of both will be adopted) will be driven by a combination of privacy/trust requirements and specific business drivers (some of which will be moulded by culture decisions, i.e. availability of national biometric database). 

For on-device biometric authentication services, I believe that the best approach that meets privacy and trust requirements is to utilise embedded security within mobile devices; Secure Enclave for iOS and TrustZone in ARM-based devices. A great example of this is voice biometric specialist AGNITiO's KIVOX Mobile solution that leverages TrustZone embedded hardware security using a FIDO-Ready implementation developed by Nok Nok Labs. In this model, the bank customer would enrol their biometric voice print on their smart mobile device and then be able to access mobile banking services securely using their voice for authentication. AGNITiO also support the server-centric and IVR-based models ticking the boxes to support multi-channel banking. 

Apple's Touch ID has certainly changed the perceptions of the decision makers in banking security, allowing biometrics to be a serious contender in providing authentication for banking services. There is also a role that biometrics could play in reducing the amount of fraud that is occurring for Apple Pay. There seems to be no problem with Apple's biometric authentication services itself, rather a problem with the card activation (provisioning) process that allows fraudsters to enrol stolen credit cards into Apple Pay and then cash out by purchasing thousands of Dollars worth of Apple kit in-store. Biometrics could close this loophole by allowing the card issuer to validate a legitimate card and its owner using an enrolled voice biometric. Tied in with the card issuer's fraud management system, a customer who was attempting to enrol a credit card into Apple Pay would receive an automated voice call that could verify the legitimacy of the card holder by verifying an enrolled biometric voice print. I don't feel that it would add much friction to the process and have the positive result of reducing this type of credit card fraud. 

I expect to see a lot of innovation in this space where bank-controlled multi-modal biometrics will compliment integrated mobile biometric solutions that have been deployed by the mobile OEM to enable customers to securely access full-banking services from a wide variety of end points.