With Billions of Accounts Supporting Passkeys, FIDO Anticipates 2025 Breakthroughs in Banking, Payments, and Travel

FIDO Alliance CEO and Executive Director Andrew Shikiar has great expectations for post-password security in 2025, thanks in large part to the considerable momentum his organization is seeing in passkey adoption.

This is, of course, FIDO’s mission. Founded in 2012, the “Fast Identity Online” industry consortium is focused on developing open standards for secure, passwordless authentication. Its specifications, including FIDO2 and WebAuthn, have been widely adopted to enhance online security while maintaining user privacy.

Passkeys are a more recent innovation. Stored on a user’s device, such as a smartphone or computer, they replace traditional passwords with cryptographic key pairs. The private key remains securely on the device, while the public key is stored with the service. Authentication occurs when the user confirms their identity through biometrics, a PIN, or another secure method, making passkeys more secure and user-friendly than traditional passwords.

Developed through a collaboration between FIDO, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, passkeys were only launched a couple of years ago, but they have spread like wildfire. According to FIDO, over a billion people have now activated at least one passkey, and over 13 billion online accounts can now be accessed with the mechanism. Major platforms are getting onboard, with Amazon having recently announced that over 175 million of its customers are using passkeys.

Importantly, passkey awareness is growing among consumers. “Just two years after passkeys were first announced, consumer awareness has risen by 50 percent, with 57 percent now familiar with passkeys in 2024,” says Shikiar. “Data shows when consumers know about passkeys, they use them: as availability and consumer education continue next year, we expect willingness, adoption, and demand to continue rising for the more secure and user-friendly password replacement.”

By the end of 2025, Shikiar expects that one in four of the world’s top 1,000 websites will support passkeys, and that the year will see increasing adoption beyond content and commerce sites, into areas like travel and hospitality.

“Travel & hospitality sites have infrequent visitors with high-value information — meaning that there is a higher necessity for account recovery, which is a common flow that social engineers leverage to take over accounts,” Shikiar explains. “We believe this sector will start to move to passkeys to address this threat and to provide a better sign-in experience for a consumer base that continues to travel more.”

FIDO’s management also expect passkey adoption to ramp up in government and banking, anticipating that 2025 will see “the first major banks roll out passkeys at scale, signaling a game-changing acceptance of passkeys in regulated industry.” And in payments, Visa and Mastercard are expected to lead the charge in embracing passkeys not just for login but for payment authorization.

For those who have long observed the slow pace of the transition to a post-password future of security, these predictions may appear bold. But FIDO has made considerable progress in promoting passwordless authentication and passkeys in particular over the last couple of years, and as its chief steward, Andrew Shikiar is well-positioned to see the trajectory through the year ahead.

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November 21, 2024 – by Alex Perala