Cognitive biometrics firm BioCatch among FinTech companies to watch: report

Cognitive biometrics company BioCatch is among the 10 companies featured in American Banker and the Bank Administration Institute’s annual FinTech Forward special report which highlights the top 10 technology companies to watch.

American Banker and BAI are information and education institutions in the financial services industry and have collaborated for more than a decade. FinTech Forward represents a new joint initiative to give bankers the information and perspective on technology they need to successfully plot the future. It also identifies the forces and trends that are motivating banks’ technology investment, and spotlights new players that are shaking up the industry.

BioCatch’s technology is used in banking applications to create a behavioral profile for users of an eCommerce site or mobile app. This profile involves unobtrusively measuring more than 500 bio-behavioral, cognitive and physiological parameters including how the user holds and touches a mobile device, interacts with an online site and responds to subtle “invisible challenges”.

These invisible challenges involve barely noticeable changes such as nudging the cursor a few pixels in a different direction, or changing the page scrolling speed. How the user responds to these incidents is incredibly unique, and are extremely difficult for impostors to replicate. These invisible challenges are also always changing within the app and are unknown to app users, rendering keylogging botnets and replay attacks (which record and replay the target’s movements) ineffective.

BioCatch first launched its eCommerce fraud prevention solution for online banking in beta back in May, and officially launched BioCatch Mobile for authentication and threat detection in mobile and online banking platforms in September.

In explaining the significance of BioCatch’s technology, the FinTech Forward report states, “fraud detection is a huge challenge for banks. BioCatch may be able to help them identify account takeover in the early stages and reduce false positives.”

False positives are often generated from account holders who forget their password or the answer to their security question. In an interview with Biometric Update, BioCatch’s VP of product management said that account holders who are locked out of their account are often required to call the bank, which costs around $4 to handle, and can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a day for a typical bank. BioCatch can save them this enormous expense.

“This recognition by American Banker and BAI is exciting for us and really demonstrates the fact that our technology brings something unique and much needed to the industry,” BioCatch CEO Benny Rosenbaum said in a statement. “By using our proprietary authentication technology based on cognitive biometrics, both banking and eCommerce businesses are able to minimize online fraud while significantly reducing friction for customers unnecessarily created by secondary security measures.”

Article Topics

banking  |  behavioral biometrics  |  BioCatch  |  biometrics  |  finance  |  financial services  |  fraud  |  mobile  |  passwords  |  security