Behavioural biometrics technology helps UK bank combat fraud

BioCatch today announced the successful trial of its behavioural biometrics technology at NatWest, one of the largest banks in the UK with over 14 million customers.

The BioCatch technology has been deployed at the bank since the start of 2016 with some business customers and continues to successfully prevent online fraud attempts, helping to protect customers. The next step of the plan is to pilot the technology with NatWest personal banking customers later in 2017.

According to a company statement, BioCatch’s system captures more than 500 points of behaviour such as hand-eye coordination, pressure, hand tremors, navigation, scrolling and other finger movements amongst other things to create a unique user profile. Via continuous authentication, it is also able to recognize anomalies in behaviours from the point of login and throughout the entire session. This allows BioCatch to distinguish the normal human behaviour of an authorized user from that of an unauthorized user, as well as to recognize automated BOTs, RATS, malware and other malicious account takeover attacks, where the victim is typically unaware that their banking session has been hacked.

Simon McNamara, Chief Administrative Officer of NatWest commented, “The technology that we’ve been able to deploy with the help of BioCatch has played a crucial role in strengthening our security systems. The breadth of behavioural biometrics that BioCatch technology can monitor is really impressive and we’ve already seen many examples of it alerting us to suspicious activity and protecting our customers from fraud.”

Eyal Goldwerger, BioCatch CEO said, “With 48 percent of data security breaches across the financial services industry involving compromised web applications, the importance of validating a user not only at login but throughout a session as a way to prevent fraud, has taken on increasing urgency. At the same time, today’s leading banks, such as NatWest, are also extremely mindful that injecting additional security measures must be balanced with maintaining a seamless customer experience, whether online or mobile.”

Article Topics

banking  |  behavioral biometrics  |  BioCatch  |  biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification