Finding the right rhythm for transactions

This is a guest post by Ryan Wilk, vice president of customer success at NuData Security.

US regulators are pushing banks and financial institutions to make cybersecurity a priority and with each new risk event, the pressure on banks and financial institutions grows exponentially. Data breaches and cybercrime continues to skyrocket; we will see over a billion accounts breached this year. The 2016 Identity Fraud Study released by Javelin Strategy & Research, finds that during the past six years’ identity thieves have stolen $112 billion or $35,600 per minute. Those statistics are driving many consumers to shun new bank offerings.

That scenario leaves banks and financial institutions squeezed in the middle between increasing regulations, and the need to deliver the convenience and increased functionality of faster payments while cutting fraud and paying to overhaul legacy systems.

For online and mobile environments, financial institutions and merchants should gain continuous visibility into digital identities across the account lifecycle to positively identify good users and detect automation / non-human behavior, coordinated activity (fraud groups/bot nets), and anomalous account creation and transactions.

New innovations like advanced analytics should be used to enhance legacy rule-based systems. One way to do that effectively is to add passive behavioral biometrics, an invisible layer of technologies that can recognize natural behavioral characteristics of individual customers. Due to the integrated and complex nature of these behaviors, they are impossible to duplicate, mimic or steal. An accurate profile of the customer’s online interactions is built and used to detect whether it is the real customer or someone else using their device or credentials.

The ability to monitor and detect fraud and bad behavior across a customer’s entire interaction on a website is imperative. When high risk or abnormal activity is detected at or before login, it can be stopped and mitigated immediately. In this way, passive biometrics allows organizations to continually monitor and analyze the user’s activity while maintaining the ability to interdict high-risk transactions.

When unusual behavior occurs, such as an automated brute force attack or bots behaving as humans, behavioral signals indicate risk and can be flagged. This provides the FI or merchant many interdiction options. The added benefit is that all this happens in real-time and completely invisibly to customers and fraudsters alike without the collection of any personally identifiable information (PII). Many financial institutions are concerned that new solutions will add friction to the customer experience. By adding passive behavioral biometrics into their existing security, FI’s and online merchants can improve their visibility into who the customer is, not just at transaction, but at all placements, including new account registrations and login – without all the friction. This gives insight across the account lifecycle and greatly improves the accuracy in the risk assessment.

DISCLAIMER: BiometricUpdate.com blogs are submitted content. The views expressed in this blog are that of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of BiometricUpdate.com.

Article Topics

behavioral biometrics  |  biometrics  |  identity verification  |  NuData Security  |  secure transactions