Acuity Market Intelligence publishes biometrics in the cloud report

Acuity Market Intelligence has published a new whitepaper, “Taming the Authentication Beast: Simplifying and Enhancing the Customer Journey with Biometrics in the Cloud”, which makes a case for the use of cloud biometrics.

The whitepaper emphasizes that financial service organizations looking to experience the benefits of the digital revolution to improve security, reduce friction, lower costs, and attract the most desirable customers, will adopt biometric authentication in the cloud as the basis for improving and securing the customer experience.

In the whitepaper, Acuity forecasts that by 2022, 5.6 billion biometric mobile devices will secure 1.37 trillion biometrically-enabled payment and non-payment transactions.

Maxine Most, principal and lead analyst at Acuity, explains that while on-device biometrics may improve the user authentication experience, cloud-biometrics will significantly provide secure, reliable identity assurance throughout various sectors.

“Pushing biometrics to ‘the edge’ of the financial service ecosystem, e.g. smartphones, simplifies authentication and reduces friction, but on-device biometrics can only link a user to a specific device,” Most said. “Cloud-based, or server-side, biometrics simplify authentication and reduce friction while linking an individual to a Unique Verifiable Identity (UVI) that is device and platform independent, and provides a non-revocable user, not device-based, audit trail for each transaction.”

“Concerns about cloud biometric data being vulnerable to theft and misuse have been sensationalized,” Most said. “Best practice approaches to deploy solutions purpose-built to secure biometrics, address data storage and management concerns. This includes anonymous storage, disaggregating biometrics from other personally identifiable information (PII) – including templates from multiple biometric modalities – and installing anti-spoofing and presentation attack countermeasures.”

“Biometrics in the cloud support continuous authentication via behavioral biometrics, and enable multifactor ‘escalation,’ or step-up capabilities, that introduce biometric challenge and response protocols based on dynamic risk assessments,” says Most. “Cloud biometrics should therefore be viewed as more than just a means to enhance the customer journey, but as a path to creating an intelligent, identity-centric platform that addresses authentication risk across the entire financial service enterprise.”

Earlier this week, Acuity released a new research report which forecasts annual revenue from the mobile biometrics market will grow at nearly 41 percent CAGR from $6.5 billion in 2016 to $50.6 billion in 2022.

Article Topics

Acuity  |  biometrics  |  cloud computing  |  market report  |  Maxine Most