This week FindBiometrics is in Las Vegas for Money20/20 2016 where biometrics are bigger than ever before. For three consecutive years we have hosted panel discussions at the major FinTech event, watching the audience steadily grow along with the number of biometrics vendors on the exhibition floor.
On Monday, FindBiometrics president Peter O’Neill once again took to the stage in front of a packed crowd. With him was a panel of biometrics and financial services experts. After a brief introduction summarizing the financial biometrics market landscape, O’Neill moderated a discussion between Conor White, President, Americas, Daon; Ajay Bhalla, President, Enterprise Security, Mastercard; Phillip Dunkelberger, President and CEO, Nok Nok Labs; Vincent Bouatou, VP Business Development Biometric Technologies, Morpho, Safran Identity & Security; and Secil Watson, EVP, Head of Wholesale Internet Solutions, Wells Fargo.
The session was titled “Biometrics Innovation & the New Password” and it set the stage for the week’s continued discussions on identity and finance. Our expert panel weighed in on the current booming popularity of biometrics in FinTech at the moment, the best practices in deploying biometrics, the roles of interoperability and multimodality, and much more.
But biometrics went beyond the annual FindBiometrics panel. If you have been following our industry news coverage, you will have noted that Money20/20 is no longer just a place for discussions about biometrics, or for biometrics solutions to be demoed on an exhibition room floor, but the conference is now where the biggest names in finance and identity choose to make their important October announcements.
Mastercard has been particularly prominent in the Money20/20 biometrics news this week. The global financial services giant announced that its biometrics secured Identity Check Mobile will receive its full-on North American launch in the first half of 2017. Identity Check Mobile uses IdentityX technology from Daon, allowing users to authenticate mobile transactions using multimodal biometrics including fingerprint, voice, and facial recognition – the last of which is responsible for giving the app its nickname, “Selfie Pay.” Mastercard also made a big splash by announcing that it has integrated Masterpass – its digital payments platform – with Microsoft Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay and other mobile wallets that leverage biometrics for transaction authentication and access control.
Standards are a big part of Money20/20 this year too. The FIDO Alliance has a pavilion at Money20/20, and in addition to having a strong on-stage presence, the consortium used this week’s conference as a platform to announce its recent collaboration with EMVCo to develop a new specification for mobile payments. FIDO has made strides this year, especially in terms of certification numbers, and can be credited with the growing availability of post-password authentication solutions available for consumers and enterprises. The biometrics-based UAF standard, and the second factor U2F standard, have both been picking up momentum, and at a recent government conference, Alliance executive director Brett McDowell said he expects FIDO to be the Bluetooth of authentication. The EMVCo partnership announced this week at Moneuy20/20 certainly keeps FIDO on track to achieve such a lofty ambition.
Money20/20 has also seen other product launches and demonstrations too, with an AI assistant named EVA that can carry out financial transactions authenticated by voice biometrics, a biometric credit card with an embedded Fingerprint Cards sensor, and a new mobile wallet launched by Safran Identity & Security. Meanwhile, Visa has made its own share of announcements regarding new partnerships focused around the opening up of its tokenization service and Visa Checkout platform too. Yesterday, Visa also participated in a biometrics focused panel, with its SVP of Risk Products, Mark Nelsen, joining Bianca Lopes, VP Strategic Marketing & Global Alliances at BioConnect, for a presentation titled, “Visa & BioConnect: Streamlining Authentication, Empowering a World Beyond Passwords.”
All of this is to say that the industry dialogue concerning biometrics and FinTech has evolved at a rapid pace over the past few years, and Money20/20 has grown along with it. When we first reported from Money20/20 in 2013 the conversations around biometrics were aspirational: What can we do with biometrics? How might biometrics affect FinTech? What innovations need to happen before we can conduct finance with biometrics? Now, three years later, we have seen it develop beyond that nascent phase into a mature environment of certainties: This is how we are currently using biometrics in finance. This is how we plan to continue authenticating transactions in the future.
Stay posted to FindBiometrics a we continue to bring you news coverage straight from Money20/20.
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