Fico acquires behavioral biometrics company to integrate AI-driven authentication

U.S.-based analytics company Fico has purchased Ezmcom, a behavioral biometrics provider used by banks, which protects 60 million users worldwide, data and applications from identity theft, account takeover, and breaches.

The two new products resulting from the integration, and soon part of the Fico platform for identity proofing and authentication, are Fico Identity Proofing for digital onboarding and Fico Authentication Suite that includes multifactor, biometric, and behavioral authentication.

Fico Identity Proofing will verify customer identity through an AI-powered biometric analysis between a selfie and a government ID photo, and will run liveness tests to prevent spoofing. Fico Authentication Suite performs keystroke analysis and device telemetry to verify legitimate customers, while a machine learning algorithm combined with biometrics reduces account takeover fraud attempts.

The new product family supports digital onboarding, eKYC, and PSD2 mandated strong customer authentication to manage risk.

“EZMCOM is a valuable security partner,” said Hong Leong Bank’s Jagjit Kaur, general manager for Wholesale Digital and Transaction Banking shared. “Their unified authentication platform centralized our authentication infrastructure and lowered costs. We are discovering security transformation benefits with EZMCOM’s innovation and expanding their platform across multiple regional operations.”

Fico plans to keep the Ezmcom team in place, according to the company website.

“As our clients expand their digital offerings, they are requesting more sophisticated identity proofing and authentication capabilities to complement our fraud, compliance, customer lifecycle, and customer engagement applications,” said FICO Chief Technology Officer Claus Moldt. “Behavioral and biometric authentication are becoming the gold standard to prevent identity spoofing and improve customer protection, while reducing friction. By adding this technology to our portfolio, we will provide our clients with a seamless approach to authentication and customer onboarding – across digital channels, mobile devices, servers and workstations.”

In January, Ezmcom, alongside IBM, NuData Security, BehavioSec and others, was named a key market player in the global behavioral biometrics market forecasted to approach $4 billion by 2025.

Article Topics

behavioral biometrics  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  FICO  |  identity verification  |  multi-factor authentication  |  secure transactions