The Rapidly Expanding World Of Biometrics May Hold Promise In Securing The Future Of Financial Cybersecurity

Biometric systems are gaining immense popularity around the globe. They are easy to use and implement and provide a cost-effective solution for ensuring high-end cybersecurity.

Biometrics are unique physical characteristics, such as fingerprints or facial scans, that can be used for automated recognition. They’re popular for being a reliable, secure, and practical means of identifying and authenticating individuals through their unique biological characteristics.

Over the years, biometrics has found widespread use in a variety of applications, including cybersecurity. Companies like BIO-key International Inc. BKYI, for example, use biometrics in their Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions as an optional added layer of security for enterprises. 

Viable Financial Cybersecurity May Need More Than Traditional Biometrics In The Future 

In most cybercrime cases, fraudulent activity is reportedly detected only after someone has already lost money or data to hackers. As such, any analysis commences only after the fact. 

With cybercrime on the rise and financial losses from cybercrime projected to cost over $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, organizations are constantly on the lookout for fail-safe solutions to protect their brand and reputation from damaging breaches, proactively. 

A branch of biometrics – known as behavioral biometrics – that has emerged from observing human behavioral patterns seems to hold promise in possibly pre-empting potential cybercrimes.

Behavioral biometrics track an individual’s behavior patterns and the manner in which he or she interacts with the device itself, such as the way a screen is held, the manner of typing, and the speed at which the mouse is moved. 

Biometric behavioral inputs, when collected and analyzed, can enable banks and financial services providers to flag potential fraud even before a transaction goes through. This enables them to take action to prevent it – either by halting the transaction or requiring additional authentication factors from the customer, before proceeding. 

An additional benefit of behavioral biometrics is that the analysis can happen without extracting and storing data from the customer’s phone or device, minimizing the chances of customer data being stolen or misused.

When It Comes To Reducing Fraud, Biometric Authentication Can Help Merchants 

As fraud continues to rise and with eCommerce remaining a highly targeted sector for fraud, traditional authentication such as passwords and pins alone may not be sufficient for merchants to successfully combat scams and hacks.

Equally, consumers are becoming more aware of cybersecurity risks and frauds, and have mounting concerns about safeguarding their payment information and other sensitive details while transacting online or even in person. As a result, customers are reportedly willing to take extra steps – including facial recognition – in authenticating their banking as well as non-bank accounts if it means a more secure experience.

However, there have also been concerns about the ability of facial recognition to prevent fraud when they are relied upon as the sole criteria to transact, especially if the face scan matches aren’t verified through additional alternative means.

One of the solutions to this issue has been to adopt a hybrid fraud prevention tactic, which combines biometrics such as fingerprint identification or voice recognition with other identity authentication technologies. At the same time, privacy regulations continue to grow, putting pressure on organizations to adhere to multiple norms and regulations on the storage of biometrics. 

All of this highlights the need to arrive at the right fraud-fighting tools to prevent revenue loss, customer asset loss, and brand reputation damage for organizations and merchants – to strike the perfect balance of data privacy and security.

The increased awareness of cybersecurity risks and a rise in the adoption of biometrics has also given rise to the growth of multi-factor authentication (MFA) – sometimes with more than one biometric method or multimodal biometrics as a preferred option for maximum protection against cybercrime, hacking, and fraud.

And increasingly, biometrics is seen as possibly the only security that can help banks, retailers and other organizations combat sophisticated fraud attacks, as fraudsters continue to use various tactics, including SIM swaps and porting scams, to redirect OTPs (one-time passwords) to a device they control or convince their victims to hand them over through deception or brute force attacks.

BIO-key seems headed in the right direction with its IAM solutions powered by Identity-Bound Biometrics (IBB) combined with traditional authentication and multi-factor options. The company believes that IBB is a way to establish trust and accountability. IBB enables organizations to confirm an individual’s genuine presence when accessing systems and provides them with the ability to audit with full transparency. 

BIO-key’s single, unified IAM platform, PortalGuard, offers solutions for a range of use cases and business initiatives, such as MFA, Single Sign-on, and Self-service Password Reset.

PortalGuard requires only a one-time enrollment and can be quickly set up for access across multiple devices and locations according to BIO-key. This could offer greater deployment versatility and scalability and enable enterprises to provide a consistent and seamless user experience.

To learn more about BIO-key’s identity-bound biometric solutions visit the company webpage here.

This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice.

Featured Photo by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay