Biometrics Takes Centre Stage at MWC 2016

This is my fourth year of being a judge for  the GSMA's annual Global Mobile Awards (Mobile Identity and Mobile Security category) and each year I am seeing an increase in the number of entries that are using biometrics to protect smart mobile devices and the services that are being accessed from them.

One of this year's nominees (finalists) was Hoyos Labs who were nominated for their 1U mobile biometric authentication product. Hoyos Labs is one of a growing list of companies that are showcasing their biometric solutions at Mobile World Congress (MWC) as mobile has been a major catalyst for the rapid growth in biometric technology and its adoption by millions of consumers.

Alongside Virtual Reality (VR) technology (did you see that crazy image of Mark Zuckerberg entering the auditorium with all those people plugged into VR units?), wearables was one of the big themes of this year's MWC. We have had limited adoption of biometrics on wearables for security purposes and one consortium of technology companies wants to change that by providing a solution that offers hardware OEMs a platform for building biometric authentication in a range of wearable devices. Gemalto, Fingerprint Cards, Precise Biometrics and STMicroelectronics have partnered to introduce an end-to-end security framework for the use of fingerprint biometrics on wearable devices. The partnership will demonstrate a solution that embeds a fingerprint sensor from Fingerprint Cards, fingerprint software from Precise Biometrics and secure NFC and low-power mircocontrollers from STMicroelectronics. Gemalto is providing the UpTeq eSE , secure hardware where the user's credentials are stored, and the match-on-card application that validates the fingerprint.

The financial services market has been the fastest growing area of biometric adoption with our (Goode Intelligence) forecasts of over 120 million users in 2015. On the back of HSBCs decision to roll-out voice and fingerprint multi-modal mobile biometric authentication to its UK customers in 2016, MWC 2016 witnessed a flurry of announcements for this sector. 

MasterCard is another financial services company that is planning to roll-out multi-modal mobile-based biometric authentication with the decision to deploy fingerprint and facial-recognition technology in around 14 countries. MasterCard's 'selfie pay' solution was piloted in the Netherlands in 2015 and proved to be so successful that it will be available to millions of payment customers around the globe. The aim is to offer this solution to replace MasterCard's 'SecureCode' online payment verification solution. This is an ideal solution and solves a real problem; how do you verify those transactions that need additional user verification and also make it convenient. How many people currently abandon the payment process when the SecureCode window pops up and asks you to enter your 2nd, 5th and 7th letter of your SecureCode? Touching a finger against a sensor or taking a selfie on your smartphone is miles better and should play an important role in reducing Card-Not-Present (CNP) fraud, making it easy to prove you are who you say you are. 

Visa, not wanting to be outdone by its main card scheme competitor, also made announcements on biometrics at MWC including a tie-up with Morpho. Morpho has many years of experience in the high-end biometric market (identity and law enforcement) and wants to apply this experience to the consumer market. This includes the use of the MorphoWave four-finger scanner at the physical point of sale. MorphoWave can scan and match four fingerprints in under one second without any sensor contact and involves a customer waving their hands through the scanner. 

This is just a selection of the activity that is happening with the convergence of mobile, wearables and biometrics at the moment. If you are a company that is involved in this exciting area of technology then please reach out to me - either through this blog or via the enquiry email address at Goode Intelligence; enquiry at goode intelligence dot com.

Thank you. 

Moving from what I carry to what I wear - wearable technology brings biometric authentication closer to us

Biometrics has been creating a tremendous amount of buzz this week at two separate shows, one in Paris - CARTES 2014 - the other in Las Vegas - Money 20/20. Innovative biometric technology vendors such as EyeVerify (Eye Vein) and Agnitio (Voice) have been demonstrating how their respective technologies can bring convenient user authentication to smart mobile devices for a wide range of use cases including banking and payments.

The financial services industry is increasingly turning to biometric technology to solve a number of problems including how to conveniently authenticate mobile banking and payment customers and how to add strong authentication to previously un-authenticated contactless payments (both card and mobile) at the physical point of sale without adding friction to a currently speedy process. The latter point would enable higher value transactions to be supported when using contactless technology - currently shoppers are restricted to around $20,00 per transaction. Zwipe, a biometric card technology company, is partnering with MasterCard to extend its trial for fingerprint biometric authenticated payments for contactless payments. It also solves the problem of what if I lose a contactless payment or transit card that doesn't authenticate people when they use them.

MasterCard is also partnering with another innovative technology company in Canada, They are teaming with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Bionym, the company behind the Nymi electrocardiogram (ECG) band, to test  electrocardiogram-authenticated payments by the end of this year. The use of wearable devices for biometric authentication is set to rapidly expand over the next five-to-six years. Not only will you have sole-purpose wearables (like the Nymi), being used for biometric authentication purposes but biometric sensors and software technology will also be integrated into consumer wearable technology to sit alongside health and lifestyle applications. The creation of biometric platforms and freely available APIs will accelerate the integration of biometrics technology into a wide range of wearable technology.

The ability to leverage multiple sensors that are continuously collecting biometric data from us will revolutionize how humans are identified to a wide range of digital services and led to synergies between physical and cyber worlds. From opening up my front door and locking my car to waking up my desktop and authorising a wire transfer (BTW I am not a techno-utopian - I know that it will be extremely difficult to have the one digital identity on the single device that can be asserted across all of my connected devices and assets).

Instead of people typing in a remembered PIN, password or OTP generated by a hardware token, their identity shall be presented to connected devices through a combination of biometric data and behavioural analysis. Instead of presenting a finger to unlock an iPhone or to make a payment using a biometric card, wearable devices allow continuous biometric feedback from its owner - something that could be very powerful and potentially much more difficult to spoof or hack. It also becomes hygiene - I know that it is there and I know that it is keeping my digital and physical assets safe and secure but it is definitely not obtrusive and annoying like remembering where I put my token or unlocking my personal safe to get hold of my bulky black book of passwords (that is getting thicker and tattier by the day).

These trends are happening at an incredible pace and as a result I have decided to update a report I wrote originally published in June 2014. The report, "mobile and wearable biometric authentication market analysis and forecasts 2014-2019" has been updated with revised forecasts for wearable biometrics authentication users and reflects new market activity such as Apple Pay. The report forecasts that by 2019 there will be 604 million users of wearable biometric authentication solutions.

If you want to know more about this research or talk to me about this blog then I would love to hear from you. Contact me through the website www.goodeintelligence.com.

Thanks for reading. Alan