Behavioral Biometrics Offers a Smart Bet for Insurers: BioCatch

BioCatch is making the case for behavioral biometrics security in the insurance industry.

In a new blog post, the company asserts that the biggest fraud threat that insurance companies face online is new account fraud, with criminals either appropriating real accounts or creating fraudulent ones from stolen data. From there, they can get away with false claims and diverted payments for days and even weeks before they are detected.

The major shortcoming among insurance companies, BioCatch argues, is there reliance on personally identifiable information for customer verification. Data breaches regularly make this kind of information available to fraudsters, who can then combine real data with fabricated information to establish ‘synthetic’ online identities. BioCatch adds that a recent report from Javelin Strategy and Research concluded that the use of static identity information for customer verification is “now a largely useless tactic in preventing fraud.”

Behavioral biometrics offers a compelling answer. By analyzing things like how fluently a user navigates an account creation page – fraudsters are much faster than the average users – and how long they take to enter basic information that a legitimate user would know off the top of their head, behavioral biometrics systems like the BioCatch platform can effectively flag suspicious behavior and likely fraud attempts, adding a valuable layer of security to an organization’s online services.

It’s a similar case to what BioCatch recently argued with respect to the online threats entailed in the European Union’s PSD2 framework, and with respect to cross-channel fraud in another blog post before that. Behavioral biometrics offers a strong value proposition across a wide range of application areas, and given the insurance industry’s focus on making smart bets, it’s a proposition that could resound especially strongly here.