Behavioral Biometrics Can Thwart Cross-Channel Fraud: BioCatch

BioCatch is raising the alarm over cross-channel fraud.

As the company explains in a new blog post, “cross-channel fraud” simply refers to fraud conducted between two multiple different channels – for example, using a phishing attack via social media to get a user’s credentials for their bank’s web app. It’s a way of exploiting businesses’ attempts to offer omni-channel support – a necessity for organizations such as banks at a time when customers increasingly expect to be able to do business in person, online, or on mobile, as they please.

Omni-channel support becomes a serious security vulnerability when different security varies across those channels, and especially when different authentication mechanisms are used. It’s also a problem for customer interactions: As BioCatch points out, “A different authentication experience on different channels can make customers suspicious and question a company’s overall security.” Worse, “[i]f customers are unsure, they may abandon in favor of another channel, or simply not come back at all.”

BioCatch offers a solution, of course, in the form of behavioral biometrics. This approach to authentication security is designed to assess patterns in user behavior to scan for abnormalities that may signal fraudulent activity; in so doing, it can operate entirely in the background, without any specific user action required. And solutions such as BioCatch’s produce risk scores so that authentication can be escalated in cases where there’s a higher chance that fraud is taking place.

It’s a smart approach to cross-channel fraud, and one that will become all the more critical as a growing number of businesses take omni-channel approaches, and fraudsters follow suit.