This is How You Prevent Fraud and Solve the Challenge of Mobile Authentication

Before the Internet, customers who wanted to transact with their bank had only one option – a visit to their local branch for a face-to-face transaction. Now, in the mobile age, customers expect their banks to provide secure and easy access to the full suite of banking services via their mobile device.

New channel, new challenges

This demand for mobile transacting introduces banks and financial institutions to new challenges inherent to delivering services digitally:

• How can we authenticate an increasingly mobile customer base and deliver a frictionless, cross-channel user experience?
• How can we establish a risk-based approach to online security in order to improve the customer experience?
• How can we manage fraud and satisfy regulatory requirements?

In seeking answers to these questions, financial institutions are looking for transparent, risk-based authentication tools.

More online services = more fraud

At the same time, financial institutions are satisfying customer demand for online banking by evolving and growing their digital offering (think checking account balances to now full-service banking in an app). This is attracting greater attention from cybercriminals. So in tandem with being challenged with how to deliver services online, banks and credit unions need to find a way to deploy a robust online authentication process to prevent the fraud that follows.

Two birds, one stone: Behavioral Biometrics

Behavioral biometrics delivers a multi-channel solution, with particular benefits for smartphone and tablet users. Up until now, banking institutions normally submitted mobile users to traditional authentication methods, which often proved ineffective. Since behavioral biometrics takes place without a users’ knowledge, the user experience improves.

In fact, there are numerous benefits for the customer when financial institutions employ a transparent authentication process. Since the user’s activity is the means to authenticate, the security burden associated with authentication disappears. In addition to authenticating users transparently, the potential for fraud drops significantly, enabling banking institutions to ensure regulatory compliance.

Want to learn more about the benefits of adopting a risk-based authentication approach? Read the new Behavioral Biometrics paper!