Biometric authentication in banking is gaining attention as financial institutions look for ways to strengthen security while making it easier for customers to access their accounts. Unlike passwords and PINs, biometric technologies can identify customers through physical or behavioral characteristics such as fingerprints, facial features, voice patterns, or even the way they type.
The growing availability of biometric sensors on smartphones is helping make these authentication methods more practical for everyday banking. As banks and credit unions expand their digital services, biometrics could provide a way to reduce reliance on passwords while creating a more convenient customer experience.
In the not-too-distant future, your bank will be able to prevent fraud by learning how you type, your car will unlock when it senses the electrical activity of your heart and the security system at your office will recognize your facial features.
That’s according to experts in the field of biometrics, which identifies a person by measuring unique characteristics such as their fingerprints, their retinas or their voice.
But these types of distinctive identification authentication processes offer more than the promise of a higher degree of security than traditional passwords.
Biometrics will also free consumers from the need to memorize a myriad of characters — a convenience that will appeal to anyone who needs to access a secure computer or network regularly.
Banks Explore Biometrics for Customer Authentication
As progressive banks and other financial institutions look to improve the user experience for their banking customers, many are looking at biometrics and other authentication methods to enhance their channels solutions. Helped by the increased use of fingerprint scanners in many of today’s smartphones, an increasing number of branch and mobile banking solutions include fingerprint or palm vein authentication (or are under consideration) at many banks and credit unions. Also under consideration are such technologies as retina and gait recognition.
Fingerprint recognition may be among the most familiar biometric technologies, but financial institutions are considering a much broader range of authentication methods. Palm vein scanning, retina recognition, behavioral patterns, and other biometric identifiers could eventually provide additional ways to verify customers across mobile, online, and branch banking channels.
For banks and credit unions, the opportunity is to combine stronger security with greater convenience. Biometric authentication in banking could reduce the burden of remembering passwords while helping financial institutions confirm that customers are who they claim to be. As biometric technology becomes more widely available in consumer devices and banking systems, it could become an increasingly important component of both fraud prevention and the overall banking experience.
Overview by Ed O’Brien, Director, Banking Channels Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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