Sensory Pushes for Biometrics in Buy Now, Pay Later Sector

Sensory is advocating for the use of biometrics to prevent fraud in Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) retail operations. The company noted that the same conveniences that make BNPL services popular with customers also make them popular with cybercriminals.

In that regard, Sensory explained that fraudsters are increasingly engaging in identity theft or creating synthetic identities to make BNPL purchases with someone else’s payment cards. Bad actors use phishing and other techniques to obtain people’s personal details, and then use that information to create fake accounts with BNPL providers. From there, they can take advantage of the Buy Now part of the equation, while shirking responsibility when it comes time to pay.

Sensory, however, believes that mobile biometrics offer a potential solution to that problem. The company is particularly keen on facial recognition, which is increasingly being used for customer onboarding in remote applications. BNPL providers can add facial recognition to the onboarding process, with liveness detection to help ensure that the person signing up for an account is indeed a real human being. The customer could then be asked to perform a second match (again with liveness detection) to authorize subsequent transactions.

According to Sensory, the biometric check can be completed in seconds, and therefore adds less friction than security solutions like One-Time Passcodes. The company’s liveness detection solution helps guard against spoofing, and does not force users to perform actions like blinking or moving their head.

Sensory also offers support for voice recognition, which provides an extra layer of security and sets Sensory apart from solutions that rely on facial recognition alone. Customers can register their voice at the same time as their face, and merchants could set different security thresholds for different products. Purchases with a lower price tag could be cleared with a simple face scan, while more expensive sales could require multiple modalities.

Forty-five million people were buying over $20.8 billion worth of products through BNPL plans in the US as of 2021. In the meantime, Socure has released its own solution for the BNPL sector.

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May 2, 2022 – by Eric Weiss